www.emojis.com

For Domain Name Servers to do their job, they must be able to read the characters in the URL you type. Originally, domain names were designed to support a small subset of characters which included: A-Z (capital), a-z (lowercase) 0-9 and the hyphen symbol. This set of characters seems plentiful but not if you are from a non-English speaking country that uses a different set of character symbols for their language, right?

In 2003, ICANN instituted the IDN Program to assist and promote the multilingual Internet. International Domain Names permit a global community to create and use domain names in their native language or script.

And….now has come the ability to create and use emoji domain names. And the world’s first emoji domain name was registered in 2011: http://💩.la (also affectionately known as Poopla). 

And, along that same line, The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2015 was a pictograph (aka emoji): 😂 For the first time ever, the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji (😂) was chosen as the ‘word’ that best reflected the mood of 2015.

Here’s the thing though: Without a link to click, or a dedicated emoji keyboard or browser plugin to type with, many visitors who want to visit and ‘emoji’ domain URL are likely to have a tedious experience typing the URL into their browser.

So, if you still think you’d like an emoji URL of your own, here’s a definitive guide to purchasing your very own “Poopla” domain: https://leland.me/emoji-domains/

Oh, and as far as SEO goes, you probably guessed…emojis are the most search-unfriendly domain possibilities out there. I personally think emojis in general are here to stay (for a while at least), but I don’t think the emoji URLs will do much more than to serve as an alias to a blog, etc., such as this guy uses for his blog “Code and Coffee”: .ws So, is there an emoji domain in your future?