Opera announced on Monday that it had given users the ability to access websites solely through emojis, they are “bringing a new level of creativity to the internet, letting you navigate the web with strings of emojis as URLs, instead of letters and words.” From now on you don’t have to use “www” or “.com” in order to enter a website, you can just use emoji-based URLs. Opera is in collaboration with a company called Yat for this project. This company sells emoji-based URLs instead of traditional ones.
Visit websites using emojis on Opera
Yats are unique sets of emoji characters and their owners can tokenize them as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain and sell or keep a short animation of the string on OpenSea. Users soon will be able to connect their Yats to electronic payments, according to the firm. Yats come in one through five characters and may be sold for anything from a few dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars: In mid-2021, a single-character gold key Yat went for $425,000.
Yats has already been bought by notable celebrities including musicians, with notable figures such as Kesha and Steve Aoki (??) purchasing it for website hosting or marketing purposes. Another example is Lil Wayne’s (??) websites or the iTunes listing for Questlove’s “Questlove Supreme” podcast (❓❤️).
Jorgen Arnesen, executive vice president of mobile at Opera stated that:
“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.”
With its Yat support, Opera becomes the first browser to eliminate the need to put a “y.at” prefix into the address bar when visiting a Yat-based website, making it easier than other browsers (a complete Yat URL might be found here: https://y.at/?✨). Yat will also integrate emojis into web pages, which means that any time you see a string of emojis on a website, it will take you to the corresponding Yat page if there’s one.
Yat believes that the emoji strings may help people create their own online identity and increase celebrity exposure online. It’s an intriguing idea, and I could see how these visual URLs might attract customers, but the sums being discussed to acquire one of these are ridiculous. Because the process of entering a Yat URL on a PC is time-consuming, even with Opera, and because URLs still contain “https://y.at/.,” it’s difficult to foresee the future of this system. It’s kind of complicated to remember which emoji should be used rather than remembering an ordinary word.
However, I think that Yats may be used in marketing initiatives. If NFTs and crypto have shown us anything, it’s that people will attempt to profit from even the most dubious digital assets.
