news Emoji could soon take over domain names | CNET

[News]

The internet domain registrar and web hosting company is making it easier to search for and register available emoji-based domains. On Friday, the company launched a search engine for emoji domains. People can visit the site on their phones, type in a string of emoji and see if the domain is available.

As more of the world increasingly uses the internet on phones and other mobile devices, a flood of emoji-based domains seems inevitable. Heck, even the Touch Bar on Apple's new MacBook Pro will let you type in emoji, something that's difficult to do with a traditional computer keyboard...

Read More on CNET and DomainSuccess

 

[erwin.groen]

I must say you did a great job over at GoDaddy Jon.
Being a photographer I can see how a picture tells a thousand words & I'm currently using one myself for URL forwarding. I can definitely see a future for them in promos & advertising.

 

[HotKey]

Picked up the single character maple leaf emoji a couple years ago - I am Canadian after all - just to see if I could set up an email address using it. I thought my friends and family would get a kick out of receiving an email from an emoji. It was limited success, working on some email platforms, and not others. But the fact that it did at all was pretty cool.

 

[bloggydreams]

Hi guys... I'm Jon, the guy who created ❤❤❤.ws for a 24 hour hackathon at GoDaddy.

I've really enjoyed reading through this discussion... I've been a GoDaddy employee for awhile, but I've actually been working on email infrastructure and whatnot for the last eight years. So, it's been an interesting crash course on domains, ccTLDs, etc...

We've actually sold a fair number of emoji domains in the last two weeks.... and we're trying to figure out how to take this to the next level. The next step, legitimizing emoji domains...

Anyway, not sure how often I'll drop by here to say hi, but if you've got thoughts, suggestions or other comments, twitter is probably the best place to find me: runnr_az

Thanks!

I'm not a domain investor but I really really like the idea of an emoji domain. I am already slightly addicted to them and registered about 10 of them ...for absolutely no reason. I'm going to register one more once I figure out which one I want.
What I find interesting is that all the most popular 100 emojis have already been registered (most around 2015). I just can't wait until we are able type the emoji in the address bar and then it resolve without showing the punycode.

 

[pablohc86]

Maybe they could be good for some mobile marketing campaign. They also will help .ws to be more known among normal people. It could be good for some people that have 1word. Ws with all the Chinese hype around I would not be surprised to see some high sales for very simple emojy domains

 

[elevator]

Once this happens, the emojis are little more than a curiousity. Can you imagine what will happen when Pepsi or Coke can have their logo as an emoji? I don't know if it would ever happen, but I bet they would love to have that domain and either build a website or forward to their main site.

Coke already launched their emoji's website for advert since 2015.


http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/coca-cola-spreads-happiness-online-first-emoji-web-addresses-163044.

 

[elevator]

I must say you did a great job over at GoDaddy Jon.
Being a photographer I can see how a picture tells a thousand words & I'm currently using one myself for URL forwarding. I can definitely see a future for them in promos & advertising.

Show attachment 42982

The challenges facing emoji domains are that some of the emojis looks alike and that can be used for phishing. For example yiur emoji looks very much like that of coke.

 

[HotKey]

Hi guys... I'm Jon, the guy who created ❤❤❤.ws for a 24 hour hackathon at GoDaddy.!

Awesome, man. How about it, pioneering emoji domains for real. Great job on the site.

.... and we're trying to figure out how to take this to the next level. The next step, legitimizing emoji domains...

If this happens, how would this affect emojis with dot-com? Would the doors reopen for registration? Or still just limited to dot-ws. It would mean dot-ws could never adopt new protocols should they continue to exclude emoji validation.

I took a look at some of the most recent documention from ICANN and Unicode. I'm not versed in most of the technical lingo, but deciphered what I could. Unicode's IDNA Mapping Table show emoji either "mapped" or "valid" in their IDNA Mapping Table, yet ICANN seems to exclude the keys in their most recent list of valid characters carried over from IDNA 2003. Maybe there's a difference? Just because it's valid Unicode doesn't necessarily mean ICANN will allow it in your url. Akin to punctuation marks, symbols..etc

Then there's IETF. In their RFC 5892 document it shows symbols and emojis as invalid.

How do they all tie together? Who runs what and where are they running to? Will they ever marry into one big, happy family?

The challenges facing emoji domains are that some of the emojis looks alike and that can be used for phishing. For example yiur emoji looks very much like that of coke.

Perhaps that mean browsers could misinterpret them as well..although every character has specific Unicode data that seperates it from the next.
Latin characters can be taken advantage of too, eg Il (capital i, lowercase l) - I've seen a doIlar floating around the forum..

 

[Brands.International]

I love emoji domains idea
I am sure they will be loved among young generation, will look super cool on facebook, but also on other social media.
Once more TLDs will support this, I am going to develop my emojis.vip website

 

[Jon Roig]

Lots of good comments here...
... and I think you're all right, of course. There are definitely phishing concerns, as well as just basic confusions between emojis. (Think about all the different smiles.) There's even a problem of how to say them: "So... I'm the white strong looking arm dot ws"

Email delivery is an interesting issue too, although I'm not sure if that's a make it or break it issue, at least not at first. I've begun a little bit of experimentation with emoji domains and Office 365 and it does work, but yeah, some services won't accept delivery of those emails.

I should say here that .ws does ban certain characters from registration. I'm not sure how they arrived at the subset of emojis they support, but they made some sensible decisions. For instance, they don't allow ascii-like characters.

I'm still finding my way around the domain world, so I appreciate your thoughts. My sense is that ICANN hasn't really engaged with emoji domains. Maybe it hasn't been on their radar? I'm not sure... I can say that emoji domains, while they're not new, weren't really widely known, even within GoDaddy.

To succeed, we're left with a bit of dilemma for where to begin, in terms of gaining legitimacy. Do you start with the browser? With ICANN?

One thing I'd definitely say, the more emoji domains which go into active use, the better the case for inclusion in the address bar of Chrome and Firefox.

 

[DnEbook]

If only cctld's can support emojis perhaps spain should rebrand ....... .es (emoji sites)
~
With emojis appearing on the new apple keyboards ... a game changer?

https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/apples-new-macbook-pro-brings-emoji-to-your-keyboard

 

[erwin.groen]

The challenges facing emoji domains are that some of the emojis looks alike and that can be used for phishing. For example yiur emoji looks very much like that of coke.

That's definitely one of the problems faced..
You can't describe one of the 9 or so available smiley emoji (only supply people a link)

On another topic, it seems the has been receiving some attention in the news!
(‿ˠ‿) : ‘Emoji domain’ UDRP filed by Kim Kardashian
I must admit, it's a beautiful fruit!..

 

[CJ6]

That's definitely one of the problems faced..
You can't describe one of the 9 or so available smiley emoji (only supply people a link)

On another topic, it seems the

has been receiving some attention in the news!
(‿ˠ‿) : ‘Emoji domain’ UDRP filed by Kim Kardashian
I must admit, it's a beautiful fruit!..

I think it is a stupid UDRP case. Besides, Jennifer Lopez is the big butt queen to me. (To be honest, I don't know what Kim KardASSian looks like. I could Google it, but I just don't care.)

 

[HotKey]

That's definitely one of the problems faced..
You can't describe one of the 9 or so available smiley emoji (only supply people a link)

On another topic, it seems the

has been receiving some attention in the news!
(‿ˠ‿) : ‘Emoji domain’ UDRP filed by Kim Kardashian
I must admit, it's a beautiful fruit!..

Wow! UDRP taken to a whole new level..surely this won't stick..

What's next, Apple going after red apple emoji.

 

[JayT]

It is not real, just a joke. If something is real on that website it will say 100% real on the bottom.

 

[HotKey]

Thanks, I did not know this. Got me!
Rarely venture outside NP for domaining news..

You know..doesn't take much for a joke to become reality though..

 

[JayT]

when I found out that site made the satire posts i was like well that's pretty stupid. but actually i like that website there is a lot of real things and just short articles are kinda fun to read.

 

[shayan]

This is the future.

 

[Mark White]

ok, I purchased a couple emoji domains about three weeks ago, one is a three character emoji which contains.. a MONEYBAG; BASKETBALL/w HOOP; MUG OF BEER. The other is a two character emoji, which contains a SOCCERBALL; AND A THUMBS-UP. I had a chance to purchased some single characters, but didn't like the ones available too me, I wanted my emoji domains to say something, like make money, play basketball, and drink beer, or soccer yes! I later found out that some characters are used differently, or have a different meaning then what the symbols depicts, such as the thumbs up character in my domain. Emojis are dated, time they hit the air so if you can pickup a short original, say 1; 2; or 3 characters that been around in the early years then imo these are the emoji domains that will increase in value over time. imho multi character emojis should say something as well.

 

[Jon Roig]

If you're curious what's still available in single character emoji .ws domains, I ran a scan using the tools available at developer.godaddy.com. Took a little while to scan through 1789 emojis and probably isn't 100% accurate -- I may have missed some domains which are available -- but kinda neat, nonetheless.

I guess I haven't earned the right to post links to the forum, but for anyone interested, the file lives here:
slack-files.com/T02BHKTRC-F341ZEZAQ-7ccf87990c

It was generated last evening, 11/16/2016.

I had to look up lots of those characters in emojipedia to try and distinguish between them -- they're mostly variations of skin color of emojis which are otherwise taken, emojis which are hard to enter, and flags of somewhat obscure countries. (No disrespect to St. Vincent & Grenadines.)

 

[erwin.groen]

If you're curious what's still available in single character emoji .ws domains, I ran a scan using the tools available at developer.godaddy.com. Took a little while to scan through 1789 emojis and probably isn't 100% accurate -- I may have missed some domains which are available -- but kinda neat, nonetheless.

I guess I haven't earned the right to post links to the forum, but for anyone interested, the file lives here:
slack-files.com/T02BHKTRC-F341ZEZAQ-7ccf87990c

It was generated last evening, 11/16/2016.

I had to look up lots of those characters in emojipedia to try and distinguish between them -- they're mostly variations of skin color of emojis which are otherwise taken, emojis which are hard to enter, and flags of somewhat obscure countries. (No disrespect to St. Vincent & Grenadines.)

Interesting thanks for posting. I remember about this time last year there were lots more available!