A Reddit user has mapped out his relationship using Facebook Messenger smileys – and there are some serious ups and downs.
User /u/dnmn8r tracked the number of smiley faces that both he and his girlfriend sent to each other since their relationship began. He then imported the eight months’ worth of data into a graph, giving a detailed overview of the couple’s…smiley-ness?
“A graph showing the number of smileys used on Facebook Messenger between me and my girlfriend since we first started talking,” he wrote on the Data Is Beautiful subreddit.
Graph via Reddit user /u/dnmn8r
As you can see, the number of smileys dramatically increases in time, which suggests that either: (1) the relationship improved, or (2) the relationship became more passive aggressive. Or maybe – and probably more likely – they just started texting more, and the number of smileys rose in kind. We’re not sure what happened on week 14, but it looks like whatever went down has now been resolved.
Explaining how he charted the information, /u/dnmn8r wrote:
“Did an export of my Facebook data, and filtered out the messages.html to only include our messages. I then removed the html tags and only kept sender, date, and message, which I then pipe separated to import into Excel. Then just some text filtering and pivot tables to get this. Graph is grouped by weeks.”
According to a 2015 study by eMarketer, smartphone users send around 6 billion emoji every single day – that’s nearly one emoji per living human. What’s more, SwiftKey research found that happy faces are the dominant category of emoticon, taking an impressive 45% share of emojis sent.
Graph via SwiftKey
There are currently 879 standardised emoji, as of Unicode version 8.0. SwiftKey reports that “Face with Tears of joy” is the most popular emoji globally – the icon even won 2015 Word of the Year.
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Do you use smileys? Let us know in the comments.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
