From ReadWriteWeb:
The amount of texting we do is insane. It's a trendline not likely to drop anytime soon, if the behavior of younger users offers any hints. Those adults-in-training known as teenagers send between 60 and 100 texts per day, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. As more of our communication takes place on this plain, colorless form, it's no surprise that people have begun to seek ways to flesh it out with some character. One increasingly popular way to do that is by using Emoji.  The emoticon-style set of graphical icons has actually been around for awhile. Young people and women in Japan have been actively using Emoji since the 1990s, says Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine. In recent months, it has begun to catch on with Western users, fueled in part by the inclusion of an Emoji keyboard in the latest version of iOS.

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