Facebook now has voting rights on emoji standards

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One of the most important standards organizations on the Internet has just added a new member - Facebook. Today, Facebook officially became a member of the Unicode Consortium. The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization responsible for the development of character encodings. Most notably, the Unicode Consortium is developing emoji standards to standardize the same characters across platforms. Facebook is one of the 11 members of the Consortium, including: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Adobe, etc.

Membership costs $18,000 per year and entitles members to vote on all Unicode technical committees, as well as any internal governance votes. "We look forward to their contributions to the Unicode project," the consortium said in a statement, "and are grateful for their financial support of the consortium's work."

The move doesn't appear to have any direct impact on Facebook or Unicode's work, but it's a sign of Facebook's growing commitment to Web standards. The group has a very limited membership, and Facebook's participation shows that Facebook plays an important role in the rendering of Internet characters. In June, mobile keyboard app Swiftkey joined as a non-voting member of the group, and all members of the group have been stable over the past year. Last year, the group's first document was a standard introduction to different emoji skin colors, paving the way for emoji, which will be launched on iOS and Android later.