As part of its new iOS 6 for the iPhone and iPad, Apple has included emojis (anthropomorphic emoticons) representing gay and lesbian couples. “Apple introduced an emoji keyboard when it got the iPhone into the Japanese market, knowing that they were fundamental to compete there. But then Westerners, fascinated by their cuteness, quick
ly adopted them too.” [Gizmodo]
While Twitter doesn’t make public the exact number a tweet will get (over 50, anyway), a hacker has processed the number of times President Obama’s tweet supporting same-sex marriage has been forwarded: 62,056 and counting since it was first sent on May 9—making it one of the most-retweeted messages in the company’s history. [Retweeting Obama]
Mister, a hookup app from the founders of Daddyhunt,com, is gaining in popularity with guys 30 and older. Among it’s 300,000-and-growing-profiles, the site claims you’ll find “suit-and-tie professionals and carefree outdoorsmen, tattooed gay skaters and beer-guzzling bears, leather men and vegan yogis, self-proclaimed flirts and relationship-minded homebodies, bearded guys, bald guys, jocks and muscle daddies.” One Mister user told Queerty the app has become particularly popular with guys already in relationships, whether open or closed: “I know a lot of guys who get pissed when they see a someone’s already in a relationship on a Grindr profile. But on Mister you kind of know that’s the deal going in, so there’s no grief about it.” [Mister]
Speaking of Grindr, CEO Joel Simhkai was invited on Bloomberg TV to discuss the apps growth and the company’s sister app for heteros, Blendr. No word on the rumored merger between Grindr and Manhunt, though. [Bloomberg News]
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hamoboy
“Two women holding hands” is “U+1F46D” and “Two men holding hands” is “U+1F46C” in the unicode standard of character encoding. Apple is just implementing what’s been in the standard all this time. Apparently, emoji’s aren’t implemented in Firefox just yet, because the test pages fail to render them at all.
hamoboy
My bad, it’s not the browsers, it’s the fonts. Fonts need to support the characters in order for them to be displayed.
J
I don’t think these are Apple’s emoticons… the majority of these have been on my whatsapp for over 2 years on my BlackBerry.