Reg­is­ter­ing an emoji domain – the way forward or just a gimmick?

Emoji URLs seem to fit perfectly into this day and age: they are funky, striking, and stay in your mind. The younger gen­er­a­tion has always managed to in­cor­po­rate smileys into their everyday life, since they are all over message services and social networks. After the renowned Oxford dic­tio­nary chose the laughing with tears emoji to be the word of the year, it seems the funny images are more popular than ever.

So, are emojis a logical de­vel­op­ment in written com­mu­ni­ca­tion? They are already vital for com­mu­ni­ca­tion among young­sters. In the meantime, they’re even popping up in browser address-bars: as emoji URLs. How do you register an emoji domain? What benefits does it have? And where does this trend come from?

Emojis originate from the dark times before digital com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In 1982, the char­ac­ters ':-)' were entered and that’s where every­thing began. The computer science professor Scott Fahlman used a bulletin board on the intranet of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh where he worked. This bulletin board could be described as the fore­run­ner of today’s dis­cus­sion forum. He created the smiley out of a series of char­ac­ters and made the first ever emoticon – the basis for the emojis used today from pixels or vectors. These are visually more appealing than the plain emoticons from back then.

In the internet’s earlier years, emoticons were the only way to get a feeling across in comments, posts, or e-mails. The emoticon language quickly developed a life of its own and spread globally thanks to the emerging mobile SMS com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Smileys were used even more fre­quent­ly and became more complex in order to express more com­pli­cat­ed emotions.

From a lin­guis­tic point of view, the emoticons’ non-verbal 'lan­guage' is par­tic­u­lar­ly in­ter­est­ing, since it’s been possible to use faces, animals, plants, or entire image com­po­si­tions to convey emotions for a long time. Since the 1990s, abstract ASCII char­ac­ters have been used to create works of art, which have been spread over message boards and dis­cus­sion forums. There are prac­ti­cal­ly no limits when it comes to the Japanese emoticons of ASCII art e.g. Kaomoji. A prominent example of this type of art is the so-called table flip ノಠل͟ಠ༽ノ-︵-┻━┻, which sym­bol­izes the angry turning over of a table.

One of the reasons for creating and further de­vel­op­ing the emojis comes down to the pe­cu­liar­i­ties of the Japanese language. Without being able to have a face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion, some Japanese phrases can end up being mis­in­ter­pret­ed. Without being able to see gestures and facial ex­pres­sions, a casual sentence can be in­ter­pret­ed pos­i­tive­ly, neg­a­tive­ly, or dis­in­ter­est­ed­ly. Kurita decided to attempt the task of drawing human facial ex­pres­sions in a small box con­sist­ing of 12 x 12 pixels and use 176 char­ac­ters to turn human emotion into mobile elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Since the technical ca­pa­bil­i­ties weren’t very advanced, the results weren’t exactly visually appealing. Many emojis could only be iden­ti­fied if you used your imag­i­na­tion and even then, the meaning wasn’t 100% obvious. Scott Fahlman, the inventor of the emoticons, came to the con­clu­sion that the creations were 'rather ugly'. The success of i-mode, however, prompted other Japanese mobile providers to copy this emoji concept. This resulted in many different emoji systems that weren’t com­pat­i­ble with each other. It was only in 2012 that the different emoji systems in Japan were stan­dard­ized to reduce errors when sending and receiving emojis using different providers.

Emojis have become more and more popular since they were im­ple­ment­ed in­ter­na­tion­al­ly on iPhone in iOS versions 5 in 2011. Af­ter­wards, they were adapted to Android devices and other mobile operating systems. Android, however, limited itself to one emoji system. It’s difficult to imagine a time when these colorful little graphics weren’t all over Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media platforms.

ICANN deemed it a technical pos­si­bil­i­ty to create domain names with non-ASCII char­ac­ters as early on as 2003 with its 'In­ter­na­tion­al­iz­ing Domain Names in Ap­pli­ca­tions' system or 'IDNA' for short. This was long before the first emoji URL was reg­is­tered in 2011.

IDNs ('In­ter­na­tion­al­ized Domain Names') can be created using Unicode, the wide­spread, in­ter­na­tion­al coding standard with over 120,000 char­ac­ters from dozens of scripts and symbol sets. Virtually all web browsers already support Unicode. IDNs enable most non-ASCII char­ac­ters in the Unicode reper­toire to be displayed as ASCII-com­pat­i­ble character strings. Since the latest Unicode standard also contains many emojis, the door for emoji domains is the­o­ret­i­cal­ly open.

DNS uses a limited amount of the already rel­a­tive­ly limited ASCII character set. Punycode is used to translate a domain name that contains complex Unicode char­ac­ters. A Punycode string consists ex­clu­sive­ly of the letters A-Z, the digits 0-9 and the dash symbol. Because this trans­la­tion takes place in the web browser and not in the DNS, the IDNs work without further changes. Prac­ti­cal­ly every con­ceiv­able character can be converted into a URL after being converted into Punycode. Reg­is­ter­ing emoji URLs is now possible.

The fact that many emoji domains have not yet been reg­is­tered certainly has something to do with technical dif­fi­cul­ties en­coun­tered during setup. On most keyboards, es­pe­cial­ly desktop computers, there are no in­di­vid­ual keys for emojis. So how is it possible to register smileys using a con­ven­tion­al keyboard? The solution: Punycode. Simply put, Punycode is only one of the ways to display complex char­ac­ters such as emojis, accented letters, and Asian char­ac­ters – using the basic set of regular Latin char­ac­ters that any domain name system allows. Punycode is usually used to display Asian char­ac­ters such as Kanjis and accented letters correctly. However, it can also be used to display emojis in exactly the same way as the regular special char­ac­ters. Browsers see this code and insert a Unicode character, such as an emoji, in its place. You can use Punycode to translate heart smileys or any other emoji into a text string that causes the browser to display the small graphics. This is easily done by selecting the desired emoji (easier to do on your smart­phone), and inserting it into a Punycode converter. The resulting string can be used to register an emoji URL with the .tk or .ws ending.

What is the advantage of buying a domain name with an emoji included in it? It could be amusing and good for usability when a burger emoji or a crown emoji is used by a certain fast food chain. If emoji domain names are also released for classic endings such as .com, .net, etc. this could be a great op­por­tu­ni­ty for companies and brands to let their cre­ativ­i­ty flow and to integrate effective emoji ad­ver­tis­ing into their marketing.

The smiley URLs also appeal to private users. Small busi­ness­es can draw attention to them­selves through the original address of their web presence, but personal blogs can draw even more attention to them­selves through versatile smileys.

The ICANN develops IDN solutions where complex al­go­rithms and rules are used to make localized domain names more rec­og­niz­able in character sets, such as Chinese and Arabic. The industry is already accepting these new names, and at the same time, is striving for these in­no­va­tions to be uni­ver­sal­ly accepted by software and systems so that there are more varied domain names.

Even though the ability to combine emoji domain names with all regular internet addresses is fas­ci­nat­ing, there are many technical and legal hurdles that need to be overcome if you want to implement emoji URLs on a global scale while main­tain­ing the same level of security and integrity of classic internet domain names. In fact, IDNs are a good workaround for the re­stric­tions imposed by DNS char­ac­ters. With their im­ple­ment­ing, emoji URLs wouldn’t exist. Nev­er­the­less, there are some dis­ad­van­tages as­so­ci­at­ed with emoji domain names.

On the one hand, there is the problem of the most prominent endings such as .com and .net not sup­port­ing any emojis, and it is not clear whether they ever will. Instead, emoji URLs can only be im­ple­ment­ed with certain country-specific domain ex­ten­sions. Therefore, Coca Cola, for example, has already reg­is­tered all its emoji names with the .ws domain extension, which is the official extension of Samoa. According to Coca Cola, the ending stands for 'we smile'.

On the other hand, browser support is still too unstable. Some browsers (or older versions of common browsers) don’t yet recognize emojis and many users don’t have an emoji keyboard, which needs to be installed be­fore­hand. Even if an emoji domain reg­is­tra­tion is suc­cess­ful, many still won’t be able to access the site. This results in com­pli­cat­ed usability, which is the biggest problem when it comes to emoji domains. While you can always enter the URL using a Puny-encoded version, the smiley URL’s playful character still comes across.

Suitable keyboards and plugins will one day be standard, but until then, emoji domains are a cool gimmick, which can be used as al­ter­na­tives to the classic text URL, ensuring your website receives a lot of attention.

Find out here if your desired domain is still available and secure your domain now with IONOS: