Emojipedia describes it as “a pile of poo that is shaped like a soft-serve ice cream; brown in color with a friendly smile in most versions of this emoji.” The emoji is inspired by Dr. Slump, a Japanese animation character from the 80s. “However, it wasn’t always so welcomed amongst emoji-fans,” writes Amanda Vanschaick in a mentioning that “people were not impressed.” 2017 blog post “Gmail held the strongest path of resistance against the emoji, stating that they felt people would be offended by the vulgarity of the emoji,” she says. “It took the persuasion of the creators of the emoji, Darick Tong, Darren Lewis, Takeshi Kishimoto, and Katsuhiko “Kat” Momoi, to get the poo-moji on to Gmail.” At the time, the creators were all from Google. Tong and Lewis were Google software engineers — Tong led Google’s emoji project; Kishimoto was Google’s Japanese product manager; and Momoi was Google test engineer and internationalization expert. Why Google? While the emoji project began in Japan in 1999 when Japan’s three major telecom carriers — KDDI AU, SoftBank, and NTT-DoCoMo — created their first series of small rudimentary graphics for text messages and emails, it wasn’t until 2007 until 2007, when Google partnered with KDDI AU to adopt emojis for Gmail, that the emoji code was fixed to make it simple for everybody to use them. And with Google on board emojis became international. In 2014, about the beginning of the emoji project: “The internal project name was ,” they write. “The motivation was to expand Google’s presence in Japan and Asia. The one thing that was missing from the Gmail experience was a good handling of emoji, which is very engrained in the culture of Japan. Fast Company quoted Tong Mojo The article described the history of the emoji as “an international tale of drama, cultural differences, and near-disasters.” The team of creators thought that the poop emoji “was absolutely one of the necessary emoji” to have in the first release for Gmail, but many at Google headquarters in California felt it was too offensive and some even were against even implementing emojis for Gmail as they would ruin the user experience. “We pushed hard for the poop emoji,” Lewis told Fast Company. It passed and in 2008, Google posted about emojis in a blog post aptly titled: “ .” The poop emoji was included. A picture is worth a thousand words (Credits: Google) “The black and white days of text-based emails have had their day,” the post reads. “Following the evolutionary path blazed by colored labels, we present, in all their technicolor glory, emoticons in your mail.” A month later, Apple began to embrace the idea and finally two years later, in 2010, emoji was officially approved by the Unicode Consortium, which meant that it was accepted industry-wide as a real language. The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards. It actively develops standards in the area of internationalization including defining the behavior and relationships between Unicode characters. Today, emojis are part of pop culture and used as part of our language. But “it’s easy to dismiss emoji,” wrote Adam Sternbergh in a . “They are, at first glance, ridiculous.” New York Magazine article in 2014 And the poop emoji maybe even more ridiculous than others. Sternbergh described emojis as “a small invasive cartoon army of faces and vehicles and flags and food and symbols trying to topple the millennia-long reign of words.” And yet, emojis have become a daily occurrence for many of us. Consider for instance the use of reaction emojis on Facebook — within the Gear VR’s video app — and how they have transformed the way we interact with posts, beyond the simple thumbs up emoji. even on 360 videos In 2015, for the first time ever, the Oxford Dictionaries was an emoji: Word of the Year Officially called the emoji, 😂 “was chosen as the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.” The emoji won over other shortlisted words like ‘sharing economy’, ‘dark web’, ‘ad blocker’, and even ‘refugee’ and Brexit’. Face with Tears of Joy According to , an experiment in real-time visualization of all emoji symbols used on Twitter started in 2013 by , an independent artist and hacker from Brooklyn, NY, the poop emoji is the 116th most used emoji on Twitter. emojitracker Matthew Rothenberg I analyzed the use of emojis in politics and diplomacy in a 2017 blog post here on . Medium _Storytelling via round smiley faces, thumbs up, and flags._medium.com 😂🌍🇺🇸 Emojis for diplomats The poop emoji was also cited in my post, together with the toilet 🚽 emoji. Both were featured quite successfully in the November 2016 #WorldToiletDay campaign by the (WHO) of the . World Health Organization United Nations I’m glad we all look at the poop emoji as a way to engage audiences around the globe! It’s fun, universal, and easy to implement as part of any campaign. Happy birthday 💩!
