I suspect we're going to see a great deal more picture characters in commenting as these emoji catch on. Over use is my biggest worry, but I suspect it will be self regulating as people get used to using them in moderation. Well, I hope so.

Since we’ve gotten many requests to use our emoji in various projects, as of today we’re open sourcing our emoji. We hope that the permissive licensing of this project will enable the spread of emoji adoption across platforms. To get the #twemojiparty started, we partnered with our friends at Automattic so the WordPress crowd can start using them right away.Twitter Announces Open Source Library of Emoji [blog.twitter.com]

The project ships with the simple twemoji.js library that can be easily embedded in your project. We strongly recommend looking at the preview.html source code to understand some basic usage patterns and how to take advantage of the library, which is hosted by our friends at MaxCDN.