[fredley]

Can someone tell me why 'Cat with a wry smile' is in Unicode? Presumably at some point someone thought that it would be useful to somebody else, hence it's inclusion. It would be very interesting to hear the back-story behind such seemingly useless glyphs.

[molf]

These are Emoji: it's a set of smileys/icons originally used by Japanese carriers. Apple included them in their iPhone, and in order to standardise them they (successfully) requested they were added to Unicode.

[lloeki]

The history of Emoji before they got standardized is interesting. BTW Google was a requestor too.