Fb.me – URL shorteners slow Web down
I’ve always thought URL shorteners were generally a load of old nonsense. We only need one, the rest are surplus to requirements. And it appears that not only are most URL shorteners pointless, they are also pretty useless at the job they’re meant to do. Especially Facebook’s Fb.me.
TinyURL was fine, and Bit.ly is doing a great job. So what is the point of Fb.me, Goo.gl, Youtu.be, and all the others? This trend for URL shorteners hit rock bottom with Binged.it from Microsoft, which is actually longer than Bing.com.
But if that isn’t enough reason for you to turn against URL shorteners, consider this: they slow the Web down considerably. WatchMouse monitored how 14 of the leading URL shorteners performed for a month, and the results aren’t good.
Not only were some URL shorteners down for a time, all were slow at delivering the requested page, with the redirect taking valuable extra seconds up. Facebook’s Fb.me was the worst, taking more than two seconds to connect and load the requested page.
I’m sure those of you who used to connect to the Web with via a 56k modem will laugh at two seconds, but it just doesn’t cut it in these days when broadband has made us all expect Web pages to load almost instantly.
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March 18th, 2010
This really should come as no surprise. Other than perhaps the big boys like Google and Bing and Facebook (whose “parents” have deep pockets), how are the shorteners to realistically make money to pay for servers and bandwidth to do their thing? Not like users would accept popup ads or having to pay a fee to shorten a URL.