Use of emojis and Punycode in Web 3 Domains.

My last post was a commercial one, announcing that 9ja Cosmos could offer Web 3 TLDs involving non alphanumeric characters.

This is more of an edu-com piece so I will bring it to Tekedia.

First a bit of history –

Now some may think that emojis came about because of an iconic 1994 film starring Tom Hanks as Forest Gump.

The film was about one Forest Gump, who sat on a bench narrating his life, with a sense of profound understatement, to various individuals who came to sit beside him over the course of the day.  The hapless and socially awkward Gump meanders through life, completely oblivious to his inadvertent contact with others having dramatic life changing, and in some cases history changing consequences.

The whole emoji phenomenon probably has its roots in the US due to a graphic designer named Harvey Ball in 1963. Within a few years, it became a symbol of anti-war protests, and the  US ‘hippie’ movement. It was initially used by the insurance company that hired him, by making badges to hand out at promos. Later it began to be used as T Shirts, decorative jeans patches and stickers.

The next evolution of this was the ‘emoticon’.  In 1982, one Dr. Scott E. Fahlman had a university noticeboard message, misconstrued. Those who read it, interpreted it without the humour he had intended and this gave it a different meaning. He then suggested that jokes and nonjokes be marked by two sets of characters we now recognize as standard emoticons: the smiley face :-) and the frowning face :-(

With the advent of the internet in the mid to late 90’s, and the first chat mechanisms, AOL, followed by Yahoo and MSN, further emoticons began to be added.

Sentiment doesn’t easily convey either a broader aspect of activity,  personal identity or business.

Emojis first became an expression of a Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. They released the earliest emojis  in 1997. It is no surprise that they came from this part of the world.

Languages based on phonetic words (sometimes called ‘Latin’ alphabet) are composed of characters that have inherent sound qualities.  These sounds may be fashioned by diuretics or rules of the language. Eastern languages have compound characters with meanings, and these meanings become modified and more specified by the additional characters surrounding them.

This is also how emoji’s work. Emoji’s go beyond sentiment and can replace nouns to bring fuller meaning.

Use in  Web 3 domain names

When using them to make a domain name, they need to reduce the size of the expression in phonetics and create a pictorial flow that everybody will instantly get.

This one means ‘football world cup’ and by making a Web 3 domain this way, which supports emoji’s and special characters, we can reduce a sixteen character string to 3.

While emojis and special characters bring new and interesting ways to express a business, or to express an individual either professionally or personally, many find it difficult to embrace the concept and get it very wrong.

Making a domain is very different from having a chat conversation.

I frequently loiter on a node to track the closing of domain auctions I have interest in, and I see a lot of crazy stuff.

Yes, someone actually wasted their time, and nodal capacity to create this. They did not even bother to be around for the closing of the bid to claim their creation. They could have got it for 0.001 HNS (about .07 of a kobo) because nobody else would be remotely interested in bidding on it.

Note the ‘xn--‘ and the ending ‘-ec942a’ :  this is the punycode that will represent the diamond, but it won’t show in actual usage. This could have been made a small bit less awkward by removing the word diamond in the middle and placing the emoji there instead. In a domain, duplicating words with an emoji is just reducing value and good practice.

In ‘domainland’ less is more.

Cross platform and ‘Alt IDNA Emoji’s

When we look at different platforms and social media environments we find that the emojis in various systems have unique proprietary appearances that differ slightly from the standard icon. Punycode is built around Unicode, and this allows emojis to display themselves in the native appearance of any environment when viewed.

‘alt’ is as it might suggest, ‘alternative’, and while there is no specific rule about using ‘alt’s it is best avoided.

The most recent well established unicode set is the 2008 specification which is guaranteed to cause a uniform character translation across platforms. Some ‘alts’ are the only alternative for what is needed, while others are contrivances to duplicate something already owned by someone else.

For example,

Liverpool is a world class City in UK. a small town in New York State US, (probably named after the former). a world class centuries old University, and an equally world class Football Club. ‘Liverpool’ can’t be registered. On attempt, a notice will come up – ‘

Reserved To ensure that Handshake is compatible with legacy DNS, existing top-level domains as well as the top 100,000 Alexa domains are reserved.’

The common ploy of replacing the ‘e’ with a ‘3’ is the ONLY way of securing this legally.

However, ‘streetcred’ is just an ordinary common noun with no such protections, and if someone attempts to make ‘str33tcr3d’ this will just directly come across as a ‘pirated’ version, and won’t hold much status.

There are all also ‘alts’ in emojis which are copies and not ‘the real thing’.

Here we see an attempt to clone a high value domain using the original ’emoticon’ type emoji. The correct Punycode for this is xn--h28h

There are other ways people try to contrive to recreate their own ‘version’ of a domain owned by someone else by varying the emoji slightly. For example, the red heart is the second most popular emoji of all time, and the default in any scenario where a heart is needed for a domain. There needs to be a reason or argument why an alternative is a more accurate choice in context. Because the red one is already taken isn’t a good enough reason.

Another example, is the card suit emojis, there are two red ones – hearts and diamonds and two black ones, clubs and spades. There is an alt emoji called the ‘white spade’ emoji and there have been instances where it has been used to clone a domain where the default black spade is in use.

The black spade is iconic, and there is no useful reason to pick the white one over it, except that maybe it needs to be used against a black or very dark background. In a domain, the use of the white spade is definitely suspicious.

Finally some of the newer emojis like the footballs (soccer, rugby and American) high voltage, rocket, world, money bag, skull, bank, volcano etc… are from a newer specification which hasn’t filtered down into all recognition systems yet, and are sometimes given false positives as ‘alts’ instead of ‘IDNA’.

Summary points, emojis in Web 3 domains should –

1. Use default norm choice unless there is a good reason not to, and never use a lesser known variant to ‘pirate’ an existing domain.
2. Convey meaning and be a good fit for text and other emojis around them. They are never justified in themselves.
3. Less is more, emojis should help convey a domains meaning while reducing the characters it would otherwise use with phonetic (Latin) text.
4. Bear in mind emojis are used differently in domains than while chatting.
5. As browser adoption of Web 3 domains and the use of emoji’s improves, the more popular emojis are more likely to see prioritized adoption over obscure ones.
6. If you are buying a domain which includes emojis, check that the Punycode doesn’t look suspiciously long.

9ja Cosmos is here… Get your .9jacom and .9javerse Web 3 domains  for $2 at:

https://www.encirca.com/handshake-9jacom/

https://www.encirca.com/handshake-9javerse/

Ref:

www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-between-emoji-and-emoticons

www.rd.com/article/smiley-face-invented/

emojipedia.org