we.b: The web of short URLs

This might be interesting for the TAG.

A paper about short URLs and their impacts on the Web.
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/144777/fr351-antoniades.pdf

I like one of the comments which is 

 Surprisingly short URLs are not ephemeral, 
 as a significant fraction, roughly 50%, 
 appears active for more than three months.

I wonder if I would define three months as long. ;) but I guess it depends on the context. It is true that three months might be long compared to the peak of buzz related to sharing one URI for a few days or even hours.



Intro from 
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=144777
    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 paper, we provide 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.
-- 
Karl Dubost - http://dev.opera.com/
Developer Relations & Tools, Opera Software

Received on Wednesday, 2 March 2011 13:31:50 UTC