Yes, you read that right, I now own 👩💻👨💻.to.
Now for a split second you may have thought I meant dev.to - of course not, I don't want a 5(6) character long domain, it is way too long! I want a 4(5) character domain! 😉
But you can copy and paste
👩💻👨💻.to
into the URL bar and you will end up at my DEV profile...and that is pretty weird and fun!
Why buy an Emoji domain?
A sensible answer to that question is that you shouldn't buy an Emoji domain!
They are not very useful, they end up changing to horrible sets of character codes as the domain name ("xn--qq8hb0wb.to" is the actual domain I bought!) and they are not very professional.
However I don't care about such things, I want something silly and fun to play with and I like to do weird and wonderful things on the internet...so why not buy an emoji domain, something different!
What next?
I don't really know, it was a silly Friday thing to do, I mean...who buys emoji domains?
If anyone has any good ideas for what to do with the domain then let me know!
Let's see what problems it causes
Next step is to set up an email account for the domain.
I can't wait to see if I can actually set my email address to g@👩💻👨💻.to as that would be hilarious!
Update: Email works kind of - unfortunately combined emojis (I can't remember the proper name) don't work so you end up with "g@👩💻👨💻.to" instead of "g@👩💻👨💻.to", but I can still receive emails at "g@👩💻👨💻.to", so feel free to send me an email!:
Over to you!
So have you ever bought an emoji domain?
Can you think of a good use for my domain?
Do you think emoji domains will ever catch on?
Top comments (46)
Have I ever bought an emoji domain? Nope.
Can I think of a good use for my domain? 🤔 Maybe you can use it to host dev related stuff. Email would be fun.
Do I think emoji domains will ever catch on? Not really. At least until there is sufficient browser support and you can get a physical emoji keyboard. Typing emojis is hard and requires extra clicks, something that is especially hard on laptops. Actually on my iPad I had to manually type the link in because when copying and pasting I got this
SEO is also probably a problem.
I think you nailed this 100%!
And yeah I don't think I will use it for anything other than a bit of fun...I might put my DEV.to demos on the site just for fun...provided I can link to the domain from codepen / jsfiddle!
Another experiment I need to run!
Yup, this will be your average workstation of emoji domains catch on! 😜🤣
Several weird things if you buy a Emoji Domain name and post it on dev.to
Being a unicorn
You own 2lkc
Well I am a unicorn, I poop rainbows and pixie dust. Why are you surprised by this 😜🤣
This message was deleted for the good
I saw it though, yes those As 1s and Ys 😉
And don't think that's true. Forgive me
All is forgiven 😋
I personally think QR Codes are the domains of the future. Once we get a QR HTML Element and users can copy it and you can click or scan it there is no better way to navigate the web, no fights more over names every app/webApp gets an QR Code wich means the browser search bar needs some upgrades, you still need to be able to search the web like you search an app store, ahh and by the way I would love to see a merge of Browsers and App Stores, (AppWeb)? I imagine this to be a mix of apps which open directly without installation and other apps like games which you can install, I personally see AppStores and installable apps as a step backward because I think the Web with instant apps and instant streaming and instant gaming like stadia is the future the future should not have an installation process at all we had this in the 80's and then came the web, so no idea how Apple did it but Respect for creating an hype around old tech like installable software. Now that the internet is becoming faster I think we should focus on getting rid of installations, every App Store can still have an review process even for web apps, and instead of having normal ssl certificates maybe we need for each AppWeb a separate review which I don't mind.
QR codes are useful for sharing bulk information in a machine readable format, but they lack one key feature that’s kind of crucial for how most people currently use the internet: 99% of people can’t memorize them, and they cannot be communicated without some technology involved.
dev.tois trivial to memorize. I can share it with someone who has never heard of it in a regular conversation without anybody having to pull out their phone and be reasonably certain they will type it in correctly (or closely enough that a search engine will find it for them). The QR-code equivalent is a 21×21 image that has to have most of the pixels correct to work correctly, most people would be hard-pressed to memorize those 249 pixels (ignoring the alignment targets), and the only way to share it is an image.This doesn’t mean they’re not good in some cases. If you pay attention to the actual URLs that are found in most QR codes that do in fact encode URLs (because they can encode other things), you will notice that many of them are long enough for typing them in by hand to be error-prone, hence why a QR code is being used to begin with.
Hey;) What I meant of course is that the apps still have names even the QR codes for them exist, so typing dev.to in search in my concept will list it in search results and you can open it same as you type YouTube in the AppStore and then click the logo to open it, names and logos still exist, the internet I describe is kind of futuristic and hard to explain but see it as a giant open app store.
I've bought quite a few a while a go, but they all expired now.
Like the premise, but back then it had so many downsides in people not being able to reach them 😂.
Or trying to explain your domain is [emoji-christmas-tree].ws
Yup, impractical and silly and only developers will really appreciate them...but I had to have some fun!
Enjoyed the Live Stream Sunday BTW Mr Anonymous!
Thanks! Haha
Yep def fun to own.
And they might become a proper use-case one day so hang on to them
Sigh. Yet another meme project on my todo list. I think I'm shooting for a Threejs emoji interactive thingie. 🐒😍🍌
I almost forgot about existence of emoji domains until your article popped up in my feed. Darn you!
Yup, DEV has a lot to answer for with introducing to or reminding me about pointless yet mildly amusing side projects I want to waste time and money on! 🤣
Glad to be of service 😜 and monkey loves banana is an awesome idea.
The combined emoji thing is most likely just a font thing in your email client. Most likely different email clients will display it differently.
It is to do with the fact that you need a combiner unicode character that isn't supported in domain names.
I get the concept but don't know the right terms, but you combine two emojis with a special character [U+200D] to create the woman at computer or man at computer.
URLs don't support this invisible character (I think because of security) so as far as I am aware it is impossible to fix the issue on Outbound emails as technically my domain name is 👩💻👨💻 and it is just how unicode characters are decoded that allow me to have 👩💻👨💻 as the domain (as it decodes to the correct characters).
I have no idea if that is a good explanation but sadly I think it can't be fixed in any email client etc.
Ah I see. The first half makes sense, but the combining characters are themselves Unicode characters (
[...'👩💻'].length === 3), so it's not just something in how Unicode itself is decoded. It must be something in the punycode spec that states that invisible characters are simply ignored. I just checked and it seems this is the case:Pretty interesting!
Edit: Actually, it might just be Chromium's implementation, rather than the spec itself. In Firefox,
new URL('https://👩💻👨💻.to').hrefis xn--qq8hb0wb.to/, whereasnew URL('https://👩💻👨💻.to').hrefis xn--1uga01807aca52bc.to/ (a domain name that doesn't resolve). Sure enough, opening 👩💻👨💻.to doesn't work in Firefox (but 👩💻👨💻.to works fine).Yeah it is something I should actually learn properly as the amount of times I get confused between &X2394; and U+212C etc. as ways of encoding emojis is quite embarrassing (as was that sentence probably as like I said, I don't understand it all properly 🤣)!
And punycode was the term I couldn't remember so thanks for that!
It will be converted to punycode, anyway.
The only problem I see with this is discoverability. Not all keyboards allow for emoji and not many allow for inserting. So, you kinda just have to copy and paste to get it to work. An alternate solution is using Punycode to type the URL, but almost no one knows how to use it. Interesting idea though.
Yup, I would totally not advise this for anything that isn't silly, for the exact reasons you mentioned.
Plus other issues I have found are that a lot of sites don't think emojis are valid as part of URLs, so you can't set your own URL on profiles (although I did manage to work around that with a little help on Twitter...but with 👨💻👩💻 as the result!)
Even buying the domains in the first place is difficult as most sites don't think they are valid as well!
Completely impractical...quite good fun though! 🤣
Let us know when the email thing works (or doesn't) 📬
It almost works - unfortunately it appears that combined emojis don't work!
But I can send an email to g@👩💻👨💻.to and it is received just fine 👍
Nice!
Whimsical and fun! I like it!
Yes, it has been a long week in case you are wondering why I did this! 🤣
And I don't know if it is just me, but buying an emoji domain just seems so very wrong...
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