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Discussion on: Emoji Encoding, Unicode, and Internationalization with Naomi Meyer

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Ben Halpern

Are emojis the most culturally-aware and culturally-impactful software concept in existence?

What is the biggest impact emoji proliferation has had on both coding and culture?

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Casey Lynette

This could probably be an entire dissertation on it's own...I'd read it!

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Naomi Meyer

Agreed! I think including emoji in Unicode has been great for internationalization of software because it forces developers to properly encode emoji and ALL multi-byte characters to render on the page. Which expands the character set supported to many additional languages! πŸ‘

I didn't have time to discuss this in the talk, but another huge benefit of emoji - is they're great motivators for users to upgrade their software to the latest version, then users get the newest emoji set from Unicode while ALSO getting enormous security benefits by upgrading! A few years ago Wordpress used emoji as motivation for users to upgrade when the real reason they needed to upgrade was a serious security vulnerability.

I also like the idea that emoji are used as written gestures πŸŽ‰