A few emoji per year... (was: Re: Tag characters)

[Ken Whistler]

And to put Mark's comments in some statistical perspective, in the context
of all the media hype, the true "big bang" for emoji in Unicode was 
Version 6.0,
released over 4-1/2 years ago now. *That* was the Unicode release that added
hundreds and hundreds of emoji for Japanese carrier interoperability, as 
well
as the regional indicator mechanism for the representation of flag 
pictographs.
But at the time, relatively few people noticed, because no Unicode emoji 
were
on phones yet.

Unicode 7.0, which resulted in the huge media splash about emoji last 
year, actually
only added 103 emoji, and the majority of those were very old news: 
old-fashioned
pictographs for Webdings compatibility. There were only a few high 
visibility,
emotionally catchy new additions among that set, such as the CHIPMUNK and
the you-know-what-I'm-talking-about hand gesture, that convinced people this
was a bigger deal new release than it was. But suddenly everything was 
visible
on phones, and that made all the difference for the general public.

Unicode 8.0 is about to be released, and it will have just 41 emoji 
additions --
among them the 5 emoji modifiers that are already available on phones
to address the emoji diversity issue.

And the UTC just approved 38 new emoji candidates that will be the likely
basis of the emoji additions for Unicode 9.0 next year.

Once we get through the Unicode 8.0 and Unicode 9.0 cycles, this process
will have settled into a kind of a routine -- and it will be apparent to all
what the likely scale and scope of future emoji additions *as Unicode 
characters*
will be: a few dozen per year, carefully picked based on a set of 
criteria now to be set
out in the new UTR #51 regarding emoji.

The sky isn't falling here. ;-) The Unicode Consortium has not suddenly
transmogrified into the Emoji Consortium. People will get used to the fact
that a few dozen new emoji characters get added to the standard every 
year -- ho hum.
And for folks who can't wait through the 
two-years-from-proposal-to-implementation
cycles of character encoding committees, well... those stickers are out 
there
waiting for you.

--Ken


On 5/15/2015 5:18 PM, Mark Davis ☕️ wrote:
>
> However, we do have strong short-term pressure to show that we are 
> responsive and responsible in adding emoji. And our adding a 
> reasonable number of emoji per year is not going to stop Line or Skype 
> from adding stickers!
>

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