Is the Web heading toward redirect hell?
Google is doing it. Facebook is doing it. Yahoo is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. And soon Twitter will be doing it. — We're talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a story about plumbing, not features. In March 2010 TechCrunch already documented how Facebook's FB.me shortener was measurably slowing the web, and Pingdom now reports the pattern has gone mainstream: Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft all route outbound links through their own intermediate steps to sample what users click.
What makes it worth watching is who is next. Twitter's move is unconfirmed, but it fits the company's stated plan to ship a real-time analytics dashboard in Q4 for sports leagues, teams and players — a product that needs exactly the click-level data an intercepting redirect provides. The 2007 debate over a maintainable and thriving web framed openness as an architectural choice; five years of accumulated redirects are quietly making it for everyone.
First-order effects
- Every outbound click from Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft properties now transits a platform-controlled hop, adding latency and a new point of failure while handing those companies clickstream data publishers never see directly.
Second-order effects
- Twitter's rumored entry would make interception table stakes among the major consumer platforms, since its confirmed Q4 analytics product for leagues and teams is most credible if built on first-party click data rather than third-party estimates.
Third-order effects
- If every major platform sits between user and destination, referrer-based traffic measurement degrades across the open web, pushing publishers toward whatever analytics their largest referrers choose to share.
The trend: Consumer platforms are inserting themselves into every outbound link, converting routing infrastructure into a proprietary data-collection layer over the web they once merely indexed or linked out from.