CS Colloquium Series @ UCY
Department of Computer Science - University of Cyprus
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Colloquium Coordinator: Demetris Zeinalipour
Colloquium: We.b: The web of short URLs, Dr. Demetris Antoniades (University of Crete and FORTH, Greece), Friday, Feb. 10, 2012, 15:00-16:00 EET.
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Cyprus cordially invites you to the Colloquium entitled:
We.b: The web of short URLs
 |
Speaker: Dr. Demetris Antoniades |
Abstract:
Short URLs have become ubiquitous. Especially popular within social
networking services, short URLs have seen a significant increase in their
usage over the past years, mostly due to Twitter’s restriction of message
length to 140 characters. In this talk, I will present a first
characterization on the usage of short URLs. Specifically, our goal is to
examine the content short URLs point to, how they are published, their
popularity and activity over time, as well as their potential impact on
the performance of the web.
Our study is based on traces of short URLs as seen from two different
perspectives: i) collected through a large-scale crawl of URL shortening
services, and ii) collected by crawling Twitter messages. The former
provides a general characterization on the usage of short URLs, while the
latter provides a more focused view on how certain communities use
shortening services. Our analysis highlights that domain and website
popularity, as seen from short URLs, significantly differs from the
distributions provided by well publicised services such as Alexa. The set
of most popular websites pointed to by short URLs appears stable over
time, despite the fact that short URLs have a limited high popularity
lifetime. Surprisingly short URLs are not ephemeral, as a significant
fraction, roughly 50%, appears active for more than three months. Overall,
our study emphasizes the fact that short URLs reflect an
“alternative” web and, hence, provide an additional view on
web usage and content consumption complementing traditional measurement
sources. Furthermore, our study reveals the need for alternative
shortening architectures that will eliminate the non-negligible
performance penalty imposed by today’s shortening services.
Short Bio:
Demetris Antoniades received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the
Computer Science Department of the University of Crete in December 2011.
His research interests include Internet measurements and monitoring,
analysis of Web 2.0 applications and services, Online Social networks and
network traffic anonymization.
