If you’re interested in a mesmerizing time-waster on this Friday afternoon, check out emojitracker, a website that tracks tweets containing emoji, those tiny images and icons that can be placed into tweets and messages, like emoticons on steroids.
From the emojitracker home page, you can click on any of the emoji to see a live feed of all the publicly-available tweets using that particular emoji.
My personal favorite emoji feed at the moment is the ghost: its winking face seems to be perfect for inspiring light-hearted tweeting, which makes for nice reading on a Friday afternoon.
The tracker is the brainchild of Matthew Rothenberg, the former head of product at Flickr and Bitly. He says emojitracker is a side project inspired by his love of emoji and his interest in Twitter.
“Most of my side-projects are simply motivated by a desire to explore a new technology,” Rothenberg said in an email. “I’d done a few previous projects involving analyzing Twitter data in realtime, and I was trying to think of something to take it to a larger scale. I’ve always been most fascinated by the social aspects of how people use technology, and the explosive popularity of emoji has been interesting to watch.”
