How would you like, if you have to WhatsApp, tweet, comment without the emoji? It will become the most boring way of digital communication. "We cannot go out together", can you judge the emotions behind it? I will rather say, No. and that's what Shigitaka Kurita thought, long back in 1998 and his one thought led to a revolution in electronic communication. Just like this :
The panoply of emojis emerged out while Shigitaka Kurita was working on "i-mode" project as a part of NTT DoCoMo - One of the major telecom carriers of Japan. What is i-mode? It was a project aiming for mobile internet embedding features like weather forecast, email, entertainment, sports, etc on Cellular devices. This project became so successful that it gave Japan a 10 year lead over any other country of the world. Within 2 years of its launch, the service attracted 20 million subscribers.
Apparently, this was not decent enough to make people fall for digital communication. Because it didn’t let you gauge the other person's emotions. Yes, there were ASCII emoticons*, invented by Nicolas Loufrani. But they are just a combination of different parenthesis and characters. Kurita wanted something closer to expressions and emotions. Hence emailing and other such services didn't clench people's mind. Even pocket net had climatic information which just spelled out "cloudy", "raining". Without appropriate visuals, the human connect was missing from all this.
Kurita felt the gap, and started working on How this gap could be filled. He sat down with his squad with an aim to create a set of 176, 12 by12-pixel characters covering the whole province of human emotions. The "hello kitty generation" of Japan inspired him to make these emojis like the heart eyes which indicated that you are seeing something beautiful. And finally the first set of emojis were created so that nobody misses out laughter, sarcasm, disappointment or any other feeling, you just add these little critters.
There were few problems which came along. The system had major faults. The users can send emojis only through mobile phones and that too through a particular platform, above all this, the telecom carriers didn't coordinate the code point which in a layman language means that if you send a particular emoji , it appears on the other phone either different or the same with some defects.
Improvements were done at a minor scale, until 2007, when Google collaborated with one of the telecom firm and fixed the problem. From a passing fad to one of the biggest accepted standard. Emoji turned out to be one of the selling points for everyone.
* - emoticons are the combination of characters from our keyboard for eg- :-) and emojis are the small pictures and icons that are rendered on the device.
