Who uses IDNs?

[dominator]

Do you know any serious website that uses an IDN domain as its primary domain and its name.

In Spanish, French, Portuguese, German or Polish?

I really would like to know. I own several IDNs myself, but it seems that nobody uses them.

 

[hugegrowth]

I've wondered about that. If someone uses an IDN .com for their main website, will they lose traffic to the .com of the same name without the accent? You would think so.

Over time I think the internet will get better at adapting to other languages, meaning it will be more natural for people to use their native language, accents and all. So IDNs are probably the future for french, spanish, etc.

 

[dominator]

I think the French don't use accents when writing in capitals, though as we know, the character set contains those characters, so there is no "techni(ologi)cal" reason for it. And I know that in many languages people don't use accents when sending text messages or emails, simply because it's faster. So they're quite confortable with domain names without accents.

 

[hugegrowth]

I have french idn domains that get traffic, and get french emails where the people use all the accents. Since the accents are a part of their language, it's natural for them to use them. I don't think the internet will evolve in a way that will make the french and spanish languages lose their accents, if anything the internet will adapt to accents, chinese letters, arabic letters, etc. because it's natural for those people.

but back to your original question, I think it's risky to build a major website on a french or spanish IDN .com domain, unless you own the .com without the accents.

 

[draggar]

I would like to but it seems that my registrar (GoDaddy) won't support IDN characters, like ñ etc..

 

[hugegrowth]

Godaddy does sell IDN domains now.

 

[dominator]

And I would like to see such a website, if it exists (that uses only an IDN name).

I registered 30-40 IDNs in 2001, and about 10 more later, but who needs them? SEO optimizers who couldn't get the ASCII version and scammers (phishers).

From what was written here, if you want to used the IDN name, you necessarily need also the non-IDN version, i.e. without accents.

They may have a future, but they "had a future" in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, I know there was a problem with browsers, but other technologies get accepted much faster, if they are useful.

I personally would prefer a non-IDN version of any interesting French, Spanish or German name.

 

[keyser]

Do you know any serious website that uses an IDN domain as its primary domain and its name.
I really would like to know. I own several IDNs myself, but it seems that nobody uses them.

French-speaking markets : 0

 

[omosquera]

It looks like there are no IDN sites because people DO NOT know that now is possible to type IDN characters into our browsers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i.e : http://www.hola-arkansas.com/news_pr.php?nid=10603

 

[Seraphim]

Do you know any serious website that uses an IDN domain as its primary domain and its name.

In Spanish, French, Portuguese, German or Polish?

I really would like to know. I own several IDNs myself, but it seems that nobody uses them.

I own a couple hundred IDN, and use them as a secondary address only, directing the typin traffic to the non IDN counter part. Works well. Search engines don't seem to like them very much yet, although I do get some search traffic.

 

[MobileDesigner]

when i type japanese into the web pages, i forget to change the language when i type-in to the browser. If someone uses another language besides latin characters, i think IDNs are excellent. we often have to press "language key + alt". i get cramps in my fingers from doing that.

 

[dominator]

BTW: I cannot imagine the Chinese keyboard with the THOUSANDS of characters. Does anybody have idea how it works? My keyboard has space only for some 20-30 letters, and it seems to me that it must be much faster to type the URL or anything else in Latin (than in Chinese). Just as it is much faster to type only numbers using the numeric keyboard because there are only 10 of them. But correct me if wrong.

 

[Explorer]

Maybe the right question to ask is not who uses IDNs, but who will use IDNs in the future?

 

[MobileDesigner]

BTW: I cannot imagine the Chinese keyboard with the THOUSANDS of characters. Does anybody have idea how it works? My keyboard has space only for some 20-30 letters, and it seems to me that it must be much faster to type the URL or anything else in Latin (than in Chinese). Just as it is much faster to type only numbers using the numeric keyboard because there are only 10 of them. But correct me if wrong.

works like this:

1. if you want to type a japanese (chinese) word such as "sakura" (cherry blossom), you have to type using the keyboard:

SA - さ
KU - く
RA - ら

2. if you type in the word "ai" (love), you have to type using the keyboard:

A - あ
I - い
Then hit the space bar because there are 22 other meanings using the word "AI". ("ai" also means to "meet" and "love" but the characters are different when writing)

MEET - 会い
LOVE - 愛

when we type in the URL we have to select special keys to get out of Japanese and into Latin. This is the only time that we use Latin (for url). such a pain and we usually forget to get out of Japanese. We would prefer to type the following to get to a url:

http://www.愛.com/　we do not have to type .com, simply the character itself.

Here is a picture of a japanese keyboard:
Japanese Keyboard (a 90's version)

Here is a picture of the basic characters for Japanese:
Japanese Characters

IDNs are not for Western countries so if you see no value in IDNs, I can understand. But in Japan, it is being used for large companies. i own only a few.

 

[DeLaVega]

I think that once IE 8 is released, and when stats show that IE 6 is not used anymore as the main browser, IDN domains will start to be seen more frequently. I think it would be awful if some site advertises its IDN domain and people can't enter it because they use IE6.

I don't know about your sites, but in the ones I have, the stats show that most of the users are still using IE6, that does not work with IDN.

 

[dominator]

I know that the Japanese language has 3 alphabets and two of them are syllabic, but the Chinese does not have. Just 4000 or more characters.

I have heard that often Pinyin is used, what is writing Chinese with Latin letters.