[gayprogrammer]

I was thinking about why Wingdings, a popular phenomenon in Word docs, didn’t translate into the web, chat, and mobile SMS until the iPhone let us add the Japanese emoji keyboard.

The technical difference that I can see is that Wingdings is mapped to English letters (I.E. the same code points), whereas emoji are mapped to their own code points. So while Wingdings are typed using the standard keyboard, emoji (still today) requires a dedicated program/menu/keyboard to select them.

Additionally, font is often ignored/lost in transmission, in things like email, web text boxes, SMS. So what made emoji just work is that it used unique code points, not reusing other characters’ code points.

[uranusjr]

I suspect your “additionally” part is in fact the main reason. Emojis in Japanese phones were transmitted not by font information, but dedicated code points like Unicode. East Asian SMS systems need to implement multi-byte encoding for “real characters” anyway so it’s considerably less friction to add some fun ones. That’s much more difficult argument to make if you’re designing a system for the American audience.

[zinekeller]

> East Asian SMS systems need to implement multi-byte encoding for “real characters” anyway so it’s considerably less friction to add some fun ones. That’s much more difficult argument to make if you’re designing a system for the American audience.

It definitely helped, but the reality is that the carriers also have (had?) complementary e-mail services provided for free or low-cost, which was uncommon in the rest of the world (especially in the '90s and early 2000s!). For example, au (part of KDDI) had implemented their emoji (before standardisation) using image tags.