Emoji Domains: What Are They and How Do They Work

It’s always the ‘Year of…’ something in the Marketing & Technology industry; mobile, content marketing, augmented reality and so on. And now, we’re proclaiming 2017 as the year of emoji domains!

Ok, so it’s not so new as the first,☃.com, was registered in 2001 followed by ☺️.com in 2004, both before restrictions brought a stop to emojis in top level domains. Then in 2011 along came The World’s First Emoji Domain: ?.la aka Poopla!

Finally, in October 2016 ❤❤❤.ws, Jon Roig’s GoDaddy hackathon project, is launched and emoji domain registration becomes available for everyone! Yay!

Here at iWeb we love to join in and so imagine our excitement when we found out the perfect emoji domain for us was available!

??.ws

Eye Web… iWeb… get it? Genius! *One small issue* it doesn’t work yet due to a ‘technical issue’ which GoDaddy assure us they’re working on. Fear not, we do have some actual live examples to prove our case.

How Do Emoji Domains Work?

Behind the scenes, as computers can only understand numbers, all the domains are ASCII codes (a numerical representation of characters). So, even though you see the domain name displayed as an emoji, it is actually just the browser using punycoding to convert xn--mp8hot to ?? and then keeping it hidden from you.

Pretty clever, huh? You can see how it works at www.punycoder.com

You may be thinking, as our technical director did, “But, how would you type them in?”

Well, it’s not exactly easy to do with a traditional computer keyboard but as more and more of the world’s internet browsing is done on phones and other mobile devices, a popularity surge of emoji-based domains seems inevitable.

Especially seeing as computers are starting to move with the mobile times, like Apple’s latest MacBook Pro, it’s new top row touch bar can turn into a row of emojis.

Apple MacBook Pro emojis

There are workarounds for traditional computers too:

On Mac OS pressing control-command-space activates emoji keyboard
On Windows (Touch keyboard needs to be enabled) click on the touch keyboard icon then click on the smiley face icon next to the Control button.

The Future Is Colourful ?????

Emoji Domains FTW! At this point, emoji domain popularity could go one of two ways: spike and drop or spike and plateau. I love them! But I also loved Pokemon Go and I haven’t opened that for months…

Anyway!

If you liked ours, check out the ones below that are a perfect match for a few of our clients: