By:
Demetris Antoniades
Iasonas Polakis
Georgios Kontaxis
Elias Athanasopoulos
Sotiris Ioannidis
Evangelos P. Markatos
Thomas Karagiannis
From the Abstract:
Short URLs have become ubiquitous. Especially popular within social networking services, short URLs have seen a significant in- crease 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. Specif- ically, 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.