A Classification Of Character Usage In Unique Addresses Employed For Accessing Yahoo! Groups Service

A tremendous increase in the use of internet for online communication like message sending is witnessed worldwide. Yahoo! Inc. provides one such service in the form of Yahoo! Groups. Each such group is identified and accessed using a unique group address. The current paper presents an analysis of nearly 5000 Yahoo-group addresses. It presents a classification of characters employed by users in designing these addresses into 5 major sets. Our results show that around 90% characters used for designing the Yahoo-group addresses are alphabets whereas the remaining 10% constitute from the domain of digits and special characters. The paper also elaborates on the divisional values of these proportions highlighting the user's preference for selecting a particular character. To the best of our knowledge this is the first attempt to study online user behavior based on the classification of character usage for designing a unique online identifier.