Twitter's #Rio2016 emojis just dropped for all your patriotic needs
Is an event truly an event without purpose-made emoji? Apparently not.
An increasingly-sports focused Twitter has announced plans to take on the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio De Janeiro. With literally hundreds and hundreds of emoji.
During the Games, tweeting one of 207 country initials -- #GRE for Greece or #THA for Thailand, for example -- will trigger a miniature flag. Similarly, #Olympics comes with a gold wreath, #OpeningCeremony with fireworks, and #Gold, #Silver and #Bronze get mini medallions.
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The Refugee Olympic Team also has its own hashtag, #ROT and emoji, an image of the world held in two hands.
Twitter has created mini icons for each sport, from #Fencing to #WrestlingGrecoRoman. Even golf, which obviously should not be an Olympic sport, gets a mini figure swinging a golf club.
According to Twitter, country hashtags work in French, Portuguese and Spanish, while the sport hashtags will also be available in Japanese, Korean and Arabic.
Twitter is throwing a lot at the Olympics. In addition to the emoji deluge, there will some on-site installations, including tweets projected live on Rio's aqueduct, Arcos da Lapa.
While Twitter's Moments feature will be tracking the Olympic news, the social media company is pushing hard into live sports away from Rio.
In April, it unexpectedly won the digital rights to the NFL, letting it stream 10 live Thursday night football games. This was followed by a deal to stream a number of professional baseball and ice hockey games. Twitter has even signed up to stream esports.
If they keep this up, you might be watching the 2020 Tokyo Olympics exclusively on your smartphone. (TV could die in four years, right?)
Topics Social Media X/Twitter
Ariel Bogle was an associate editor with Mashable in Australia covering technology. Previously, Ariel was associate editor at Future Tense in Washington DC, an editorial initiative between Slate and New America.
