[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.