With the development of social networks, there are many ways that help you quickly and concisely express your emotions. In addition to the fact that many words have acquired their abbreviated forms - “ATP”, “bb”, “NZ”, etc., emoticons have appeared that help to quickly answer the interlocutor. Now the most popular among smartphone users are emoji smiles.
What is it?
Few people thought about this issue. Often, such emoticons are used in different messengers and social networks. But not everyone knows that emoji is the language of ideograms that first appeared in Japan. Used in emails and web pages.
Previously, emojis were pictograms, had a fairly wide selection of interpretations, and were immediately available on the virtual keyboard of a mobile device. After some time, when many learned that emojis are a great way to show emotions, but still lack something, emoticons were developed that directly reflect feelings.
History
Emoji first appeared in 1998. Initially, there were 172 pieces, they had a small size of 12x12 pixels. They were created by one of the developers of mobile Internet. Therefore, emoji emoticons are included in the messaging function.
It is also known that a certain Nicolas Laufrani saw that emoticons are very popular and used. Therefore, I wanted to experiment with animation. This was justified by the fact that emoticons and emojis initially looked like a set of punctuation marks. Therefore, Laufrani simply wanted to refine the characters and make them more interactive.
As a result, Nicolas was able to develop a whole online dictionary, which was divided into categories: food, flags, emotions, holidays, etc. By the way, for the first time his invention was patented in 1997. Emoticons were immediately posted on the Internet in gif format. Within a few years, they could be downloaded to any user.
Promotion
When people learned that emoji is the best way to express their emotions concisely, their technical support began. Many companies began to work on introducing such a set of graphic feelings into their mobile keyboards.
Moreover, initially only Japan had access, but specialists were able to find some collections in Unicode. Thus, emojis got to other states. So they began to appear on smartphones running Windows Phone and in "apple" devices. In 2009, these emoticons were noticed in the Gmail service. After that, emojis instantly dispersed to popular social networks and instant messengers: VKontakte, Telegram, Vatsap and Hangouts.
Support
By the way, despite the fact that emojis are very popular emoticons, their support on different devices can be different. Depending on the operating system, some icons may look like ordinary squares. Some turn into black and white copies.
To keep all users happy, in 2013, Google introduced default emoji support in its keyboard. Starting with Android 4.4, each device correctly supports any character. For those who stayed on the old operating system, there is a solution: you can download either an independent keyboard or an add-on to it in the Play Market, which includes a set of emojis.
Update
Every year, each operating system makes an emoji update. This also happens because many users no longer have the characters available to express their emotions. At the end of 2015, as many as 150 new emoticons were released. Moreover, many of them turned out to be understandable, but there are those that are still not fully understood.
In addition, there are new trends on the Web, new memes that need to be educated. Therefore, developers are trying to create popular icons.
Difficulties
Despite the seemingly obvious meanings, when you consider the VK emoji, you begin to wonder if we are interpreting their meaning correctly. There are a large number of images that are similar to each other. Often they are interpreted approximately the same, but it turns out that some of them have the opposite meaning.
For example, the well-known emoticon with an extended tongue has three copies. Many interpret them as a mocking emotion. It turns out that one of them really matters "I'm fooling around." Another means that you have an extreme dislike for the topic under discussion, and the third means that you are suffocating.
If you cannot figure out emojis, which some characters mean , you still don’t understand, you can find an encyclopedia that will explain each icon. Then your communication will become more correct and will not cause awkward situations.