Emoji domains have been around for years, but still haven't caught on.
[Unfortunately, the Habr editor does not allow you to insert emoji into the text. Emoji links can be found in () / approx. transl.]
If you type ghostemoji.ws into the address bar of your browser and .ws, you will be taken to two different sites. And that's just one of the problems people have with emoji URLs.
Emoji domains have been around for quite some time, and were made famous by a 2015 Coca-Cola ad campaign in South America. The use of 2823 available emojis overcomes language barriers, which can be useful for international companies.
But they didn't take off for several reasons. For example, in practice, emoji URLs are much easier to type on a phone than on a desktop computer. Many people don't even know about the commands that open the emoji keyboard in their browser. Emoji cannot be entered in a user's bio on Instagram and as links in Google Docs.
Even operating systems took a long time to support emoji. They did not appear on the Mac until OS X 10.7 Lion, on the iPhone until iOS 6, on the PC until Windows 7, on Androids until 4.4.
However, because emoji are constantly being updated by the Unicode Consortium, which approves standards for them, some of the newest emoji may not be displayed.
For example, , an investor in domain names and digital assets, treats URLs containing emoji badly. “If I told you ‘your domain will be a teddy bear emoji dot double es’, it would be longer than the domain itself and require several words,” Howey says. He domains like Seniors.com and Guy.com for millions of dollars.
Howie owns about 450 emoji domains. The most expensive one is .ws, or "smiling-eyed emoji" or "blush emoji", for which he asks $9500, and the cheapest one is , "triple snow", for which they ask for $95.
Another site for sellers of emoji domains, Efty, sells some domains for $59.
“I think the interest in emoji domains has fallen off because it's a very new topic and that most people hesitate when faced with the first annoyance of emoji domains, which is not being able to pronounce it,” Howey says.
Speaking of inconvenience, these characters are also not always fully compatible with screen readers designed for people with absent or poor eyesight. Non-Visual Desktop Access, an open-source screen reader for Windows, and a program built into Apple computers can speak them out loud, but built-in readers for iOS and Android phones cannot. Therefore, "I ” will be read as “I love you red heart” on iPhone and “I love you heart” on Android.
For ICANN, the domain name and IP address management corporation, emoji domains represent another : they are not safe.
“Some emoji look different across platforms, so when a user looks at a URL, they may not know what character is shown there,” says Paul Hofman, Chief Technology Officer at ICANN. “Moreover, some emoji are very similar to others, and this can lead to confusion, and in the worst case, to fraud.”
In theory, a user can very easily fall for phishing by clicking on the green apple emoji () instead of the red emoji (). The same can be said about emoji depicting people with different skin colors. Even the same emoji look different in different browsers and social networks, which can be confusing.
“The impact of emoji on security and interoperability convinced the public that they should not be allowed to be used in domain names,” adds Hoffman.
There are two types of domains, generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). ICANN helps keep the world of generic domains orderly and secure by issuing rules for their use. But it has no power over how each country decides to register its domains. Therefore, if emoji cannot be used in domains such as .com or .org that fall under ICANN's jurisdiction as gTLDs, they can appear in domains in different countries, such as Samoa, which has chosen not to follow ICANN's standards. Therefore, emoji domains end in .ws.
Howey acknowledges concerns about the security of using emoji domains, but insists that the issue does not eliminate the existence of a market for them.
Many emoji domains redirect users to regular web addresses. Eg, .ws (happy face) redirects the user to the Australian photographer's personal website. A .ws (phone) - to the website of a Mexican web design company.
Search engines, such as Google, also know how to work with emoji searches in domains. Emoji work on Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Google, although searching for emoji such as pizza or hamburger will return pages with explanations of what emoji are. So if you're trying to find the nearest pizzeria or hamburger place, searching with emoji won't help you. But still they can be searched and some sites get their visitors thanks to such searches.
Howey expects emoji domains to become more popular and is preparing for whatever he thinks is possible. More recently, he bought domains that use pizza slice emoji and house emoji. It doesn't buy up all the emoji domains to resell, but concentrates on those that could become popular, like emoji or triple emoji. He chooses what he thinks will be commercially valuable in the future, and what people can connect with emotionally.
“I think their novelty has kept them from growing in popularity as quickly as they would have liked,” says Howey. “But they have a hidden tendency to increase in popularity.”
Source: habr.com