That's kinda what I figured. A very simple elegant solution.

Unless you guys would be willing to share, I assume this to mean that I should whip up a text form on my webserver, and send all the emojis to myself in order to get the values I need to grok on :).

I didn't immediate notice that this works in-browser on Brightkite as well. How exactly was this implemented so that everyone(?) can see them?

There are free ways of doing it now, both developer and not developer based. There's an app with an Easter Egg called "Spell Number", for free in the AppStore, that will do it if you open the application and enter:
9876543.21 , then the keyboard will be enabled.

vIdentity (.org) is excellent in the profile pages realm. It's a shame more providers don't implement a similar system. (XFN... vCard... etc.).