July 17th

Today is World Emoji Day. Emoji really are something we all take for granted. I mean, nowadays there's a standard for emojis set by Unicode, but this wasn't always the case. How it used to be on a younger internet is that there were just emoticons, like " :^) " or " O_o " that were little text faces, and some websites would have personalized smilies you could use on that site alone. The first emoji set created under what would become the start of the modern emoji standard was created in Japan in 1997 for SkyWalker mobile phones. SkyWalker maintained and updated these emojis on their own into the 2000s, but something big happened in 2008. The company that carried the Skywalker phones in Japan was also the exclusive carrier for iPhones in Japan at launch, so Apple designed their emojis to be compatible with the SkyWalker emojis. The iPhone blew up in popularity, and everyone wanted to be compatible with Apple. Then Unicode, the project to make all human text universally displayable on all electronic devices, took the wheel and the rest is history.