Damien Wilde / Android Authority
TL;DR
- EmojiTracker was built to gather usage statistics of emoji.
- API changes following Twitter’s sale in 2023 broke the site’s old functionality.
- Emojipedia has now managed to get things running again with new user-sourced data, and support for the latest emoji.
It eventually happens to all of us: One day you’re merrily texting away, peppering your messages with a healthy serving of emoji, and then you stumble across some news in your feed — Your Favorite Emoji Are Now No Longer Cool! Are you so out of touch? (No, it’s the children who are wrong.) Well, if you want to stave off that day, we’ve got just the trick, with the return of the new-and-improved EmojiTracker.
World Emoji Day is coming up a little later this week, on July 17, and to kick things off early, Emojipedia just announced that it’s launched an overhaul of EmojiTracker, now featuring real-time updates of usage around the globe.
EmojiTracker got started over a decade ago, generating usage statistics based on social media to offer a ranking of every emoji by popularity. That worked fine for years, but when Twitter became X back in 2023, new API restrictions essentially killed that version of the site.
In order to get around that obstacle, Emojipedia now relies on usage data provided by its own users. Additionally, the tracker’s been updated to support the full set of 3,790 emoji define up through Unicode 16.0. While we imagine that most people are going to be focused on the top few dozen most popular entries, it’s still nice to know we can dig down for statistics on even our most esoteric favorites.
Over on the EmojiTracker site you can break statistics down by region, or take a walk down memory lane and even look at the old, archived Twitter dataset. Emojipedia even teases that “a hidden feature from the original tracker remains intact for this new incarnation.” If you’ve worked that secret out, go ahead and spill it down in the comments so the rest of us can give it a try!
