Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

Usually I’m buried in the realm of just code, but yesterday I had the fun job of open sourcing the beautifully designed Emoji set we use at Twitter:

was a pleasure collaborating with @design, @WordPress and @MaxCDN to open source our emoji https://t.co/Pyt6OnuTuL

— Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) November 6, 2014

Why does this make me happy? First off, emojis are fun, hugely popular and standardized by the Unicode Consortium. One of the interesting sites I came across was EmojiTracker which shows real time emoji usage across Twitter.

Finally and more importantly, emoji have been historically plagued by licensing issues. Due to some of these concerns, WordPress reached out to us to see if we were interested in collaborating and opening up our emoji set. We thought this was a great idea, so here we are today.

@TwitterOSS Thanks Twitter! We ❤️ the emoji and excited to work with you to make it available to all our blogs! #twemojiparty

— WordPress.com (@wordpressdotcom) November 6, 2014

In the end, my hope is that us sharing our emoji with a permissive license will help alleviate some of the IP issues and help open up the web a little bit more for everyone.