😶🐺.🤨 - Opera browser now allows emoji-only web addresses

[Lightwreather]

Summary

Web browser company Opera said Monday it will enable emoji-only based web addresses “to bring a new level of creativity to the internet.” The integration is part of a partnership with Yat, a company that sells URLs with strings of emoji in them.

 

Quotes

Quote

 “It’s been almost 30 years since the world wide web launched to the public, and there hasn’t been much innovation in the weblink space: people still include .com in their URLs,” Jorgen Arnesen, executive vice president of mobile at Opera, said in a press release.

Yat pages are unique domains generated when someone purchases a string of emoji (which itself is called a Yat). The owner of a Yat can create an NFT of their emoji string, and the company plans to eventually let users connect their Yats to electronic payments. According to the company, musicians are among the early adopters of Yats; for instance, singer Kesha’s Yat page is the emojis Rainbow Rocket Alien followed by y.at, which redirects to her Kesha’s World website.

Yat co-founder Naveen Jain said Yat emoji domains let users personalize their internet identity, potentially giving creators, artists, and others, more visibility online. The company introduced Yat pages on February 1st.

With the Opera integration, users won’t have to type in the y.at part of the Yat page web address as they do in other browsers — so to get to Kesha’s Yat page in Opera, you’d just type in the Rainbow Rocket Alien emojis.

 

My thoughts

Oh dear, as if URLs weren't alreadt a pain to deal with previously (in some cases), here comes emojis to complicate it further. So apparently this is now a thing and as you can tell by the introductory statement, I'm not a fan. This might increase scams and the like as with emojis the differences can be extremely minor, not to mention that different companies and devices will have slightly different variations (side note: This used to much worse before the Unicode council for emojis). Also, on desktops, this is probably going to be a lot more inconvinent as you'd have to bring up the built-in emoji keyboard, which is an experience I'd rather not endure again. That aside, I did go to the website to see how much they charge for such URLs. For a three emoji URL (the most they provide) of Wolf, Violin, Score (as in the musical one) it was about 95 USD for a perpetual licence, not too bad. But if you drop it to one or even two emojis (you know to make it less likely for look-alike URLs), the price tag baloons upto to a base price of 200k. I am astounded.

Now with all that being said, I wish this dies a quick and horrible death. (Jeez, I cannot remember the last time I was this opinionated on something)

 

Sources

TheVerge

[HanZie82]

Oh lord, the emoticons are coming for us...
Emoji's can be nice to put some emotion in an otherwise emotionless way of communication.
But in a web-adres, fuck no. Thats just awful!!!

[AudiTTFan]

5 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

 I wish this dies a quick and horrible death

To me this sounds more like a useless gimmick than anything else, so I'm gonna go ahead and guess it'll do exactly that

[HanZie82]

2 minutes ago, AudiTTFan said:

To me this sounds more like a useless gimmick than anything else, so I'm gonna go ahead and guess it'll do exactly that

Here's hoping!

But you CANNOT underestimate the stupidity of the people that are online.

[AudiTTFan]

Just now, HanZie82 said:

Here's hoping!

But you CANNOT underestimate the stupidity of the people that are online.

If I turn out to be wrong and this ends up being a big hit, I guess it's time for everyone to screenshot what I said so they can send it to me in the future (on the new linustips(dot)com forum) and call me an idiot..

[WhitetailAni]

[Somerandomtechyboi]

That one idiot that pays 200k for an emoji domain just for emoji domains to flop be like

 

[Eigenvektor]

And there's absolutely no way this is going to be abused for another round of phishing domains.

 

Now, was it .com or .com…

[Taf the Ghost]

[porina]

With only Opera supports it, it might as well not exist. However they could be cashing in on FOMO since I could see single-emoji being snapped up for large orgs looking to do something different. Imagine Apple buying the apple emoji, then suing everyone else to stop using it  Wait, which site will that go to?

[Lightwreather]

10 minutes ago, porina said:

Wait, which site will that go to?

This one exists, y.at/:

 

Spoiler

But not this one, y.at/:

 

Spoiler

 

[duncannah]

Safari had this for a while and yet it hasn't impacted the popularity of emoji domains at all, even while being a much more popular browser than Opera.

[WolframaticAlpha]

This is so weird. Lol. Waiting for NFT URLs(lmao)

[Doobeedoo]

This reminds me of those social media noobs that in every response and sentence and especially at the end, just spam so many emojis.

[Heliian]

59 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

This reminds me of those social media noobs that in every response and sentence and especially at the end, just spam so many emojis.

There is a special place in hell for those people. 

[Quackers101]

images, crypto, now get your NFT web address and NFT domain.

[Elijah Kamski]

We had the Emoji Movie, we are now prepared to handle this, we are now nuke capable.

 

Bring in the twitter nuke!

[Vishera]

Imagine getting tricked into inserting emojis into the address bar and getting malware.

[HenrySalayne]

Despite all the negativity and hate in this thread, I like the idea. We get so many new ways to express ourself in everyday life:

 

y.at/ 

 

 

[soldier_ph]

inb4 there's also going to be an NFT integration in some form with that. 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

reminder Opera was bought out by a Chinese company afaik, i used to use it back in 2010-2014

[Mark Kaine]

12 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

y.at/ 

Doesn't work…

 

 

 

 

 

 

On 2/14/2022 at 7:10 PM, Eigenvektor said:

Now, was it .com or .com…

yeah, but i think its like .

 

(and they only have a very limited number of emojis)

 

well, idk how it works but i looked at their auction list… i think even just

 

should work

 

 

 

 

 

[Quackers101]

when the bots spam and its a link without you knowing it. welcome malware, mr malvin.

[Lightwreather]

11 hours ago, soldier_ph said:

inb4 there's also going to be an NFT integration in some form with that. 

 

On 2/14/2022 at 8:32 PM, J-from-Nucleon said:

The owner of a Yat can create an NFT of their emoji string,

 

[EL02]

lmao why is .com taken