In anticipation for the next Star Wars film, Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, Twitter has teamed up with Disney and Lucasfilm to create some special Star Wars emoji.
That's right. Star Wars emoji. This is not a drill.
Three new emoji-like icons, which are custom to Twitter.com and Twitter's official apps (thus, they don't appear in Tweetdeck or third-party clients), will appear onlinE when users use various Star Wars-related hashtags: #C3P0, #Stormtrooper and #BB8. Using the various Star Wars-related hashtags can trigger the icons, but thus far, it looks like only those three characters are represented.
Each of the three icons are characters in the upcoming film, The Force Awakens.
Let's be clear. These are not officially included in the emoji specification as designated by Unicode. That's why they only work on Twitter.com and in the official Twitter mobile apps. It's also why Twitter hasn't replaced the hashtags with the emoji-like characters; it just added the characters next to the hashtags.
Still, this is an inventive way of extending the idea of emoji in a Twitter-specific way.
If you're looking for emoji related to Luke, Leia, R2D2 or Darth Vader, these are not the droids you are looking for. Sorry.
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