They're displayed right next to your best friends on Snapchat. They’re circulated around 700 million times on Facebook everyday. They’re 50 percent off all comments on Instagram.
Emojis, Emojis, everywhere, and we still can’t get enough. But where did it all begin? During the '80s and late '90s, we were using punctuation marks and letters on our keyboards to type out all kinds of facial expressions or ‘emoticons'.
Soon after emoticons took off, Japan debuted with its own version called 'kaomojis', the world's first upright emoticons. But that's not it. Japan was also the birthplace of the first-ever emoji set.
However, there is quite a bit of confusion about whether it was Docomo or Apple's Japanese partner Softbank that launched the first set in the late '90s. While both the emoji sets look very different, it was Google that made them a global hit.
The company is largely credited with the unification of emojis across platforms. There is even a complete wikipedia style-resource, calle