> The Emojipedia itself is full of strange cultural assumptions.
Completely agreed. Despite this though, emoji have been a net win. Everyone was using emoticons anyway, but there was no way to use them between devices (gmail sending emoticons as attachments in emails springs to mind). Now we can send them via text message in all major smartphone OSs and they're used on Twitter etc. There's clearly a cultural demand for them, as they've become a part of the way we communicate, so standardisation is a good thing. Whether unicode is the place to do it though... I don't know, but I don't know who else could either, and it's not like there's a lack of code points in the unicode spec for it.
Completely agreed. Despite this though, emoji have been a net win. Everyone was using emoticons anyway, but there was no way to use them between devices (gmail sending emoticons as attachments in emails springs to mind). Now we can send them via text message in all major smartphone OSs and they're used on Twitter etc. There's clearly a cultural demand for them, as they've become a part of the way we communicate, so standardisation is a good thing. Whether unicode is the place to do it though... I don't know, but I don't know who else could either, and it's not like there's a lack of code points in the unicode spec for it.