Emoji – pistol.tk is now mine

With iOS 5 came Emoji. Emoji is a Japanese term for the picture characters or emoticons used in Japanese messages. Yes, it’s emoticon-like, but there’s a wider range provided. What was significant in iOS 5 (and Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”) is bringing it formally into the OS due to the inclusion of Emoji in the Unicode 6.0 standard.

I discovered how to enable Emoji on my iPhone, I showed Wife and Daughter, and texting hasn’t been the same since. You can also get it on Lion.

The rest of this article might not make sense if you’re viewing it on a computer that can’t show Emoji.

Of course, the most amusing Emoji character is Unicode Character U+1F4A9, ‘PILE OF POO’. 💩 <– That little guy.

I’m not sure how he looks on other systems, but here on Apple-based OS’s, it’s not just a pile of poo, but it’s a pile of poo with a happy face. The Poo Man.

First, the artwork is amusing. Second, you have to realize there was an explicit decision made to include a character in the Unicode Standard that represented a pile of poo. Why? There was debate to include poo or not. There were justifications put forth as to why a character that represented a turd was important to put in there, and someone likely argued against its inclusion and put forth reasons for not including it in the standard. Then there were discussions as to what to name it. It’s not a lump, a mound, a group… it’s a pile. It’s not a turd, a shit, dung, no, it’s poo. This is now formalized: pile of poo. Imagine a group of people in suits sitting around a table debating all of these details. Isn’t technology wonderful?

The amusement was fine, but then I read on JWZ’s blog a little more about the pile of poo. Specifically, I saw the guys at Panic talking about the first Emoji domain: http://💩.la

Yes, Poopla. The guys at Panic have created the most important website in the world.

Alas, the Laos TLD (.la) doesn’t support Emoji registrations any more. However, it seems the territory of Tokelau and their .tk TLD still allows emoji registrations.

And I couldn’t help myself.

I registered: 🔫.tk. That’s the Emoji “Pistol” character (Unicode: U+1F52B (U+D83D U+DD2B), UTF-8: F0 9F 94 AB), dot tk.

With so many Emoji already taken, I was surprised it was still available.But now it’s mine, for all my geeky amusement.