URL Shorteners Slow Down The Web - Especially Facebook's FB.me
It's hard to imagine a Web sans URL shortening services nowadays but you can rest assured that they're here to stay - for better or worse. Question is: how do the likes of bit.ly, TinyURL and Goo.gl score in terms of speed and availability?
Context & Ripple Effects
Shorteners went from novelty to plumbing over the past year: the New York Times documented their spread in May 2009, and bit.ly has been layering services on top ever since, from an attempted paid news product to malicious-link warnings. This analysis adds a cost line nobody had priced: every shortened link inserted into a feed now taxes page load times, with Facebook's own FB.me the worst performer tested.
First-order effects
- Publishers and developers who embed or redirect through shorteners inherit measurable latency on their pages, with traffic routed via FB.me hit hardest given Facebook's reach as the most-visited U.S. site per Hitwise.
Second-order effects
- Speed and uptime become competitive weapons for bit.ly, TinyURL and Google's newer Goo.gl, forcing each to weigh performance against the added features — analytics, malware warnings — that justify their existence as businesses.
Third-order effects
- If sharing keeps flowing through feeds, the shortener hardens into core web infrastructure where scale players like Google and Facebook can absorb the engineering cost while smaller services compete on features they cannot afford to run fast.
The trend: As link-sharing concentrates inside social platforms, URL shorteners are shifting from convenience tools into a performance-critical middle layer of the web.