This might be the best and also the most terrifying use of real-time social media data that we've ever seen.
EmojiTracker is a Rocket Workshop project which tracks which emoticons are used on Twitter.
And counts them.
The result is a stunning, simple and frankly worrying dashboard of icons, which is also excellent evidence of our growing inability to use the English language alone to express our emotions. But the result is so dizzying that the makers have been forced to include an epilepsy warning, lest it prove just too much to take.
So far the most popular emojis are a heart inside a white background (69,354,709 instances), a weeping face (about 32 million) and a bashful face (close behind at 31 million).
The minds behind it write:
"This is an experiment in realtime tracking of all emoji used on twitter. it takes advantage of a number of technologies, notably the twitter streaming API, redis, SSE, and other good stuff. If you're a nerd, you can check out the code on github and make it better!"