URL shorteners have become a fact of life, given the proliferation of short messaging services (and also the demands of print, which finds URL shorteners mean you can link to long URLs in a few characters). But they're sometimes a roadblock - at least, the one from Facebook is.
That's the conclusion of a study by Watchmouse, which studied the performance of a group of link shorteners and found:
"According to our data, Facebook's fb.me is by far the slowest. It adds over two seconds on average to the page load time after the click on a link. And, quite a few others still take over half a second of the page load time, which is really way too much for just a URL redirection. This substantially affects the user experience."
Google, whose shortener is nominally in Greenland (.gl), does best. Is.gd (Grenada! But actually hosted in the UK) does quite well. .me, which was originally assigned to Montenegro but which it turned into a worldwide top-level domain - after all, this is the me generation - isn't performing so well because Facebook's servers aren't optimised:
"Another interesting thing we noticed is that only a few of the URL shorteners optimized their name servers (DNS) for international use – i.e. it takes half a second for some of the URL shorteners just to lookup the IP address that is needed for a browser to retrieve a web page. That means, that while it might be fast for a visitor from the US, a visitor from Asia might get some extra waiting time when using snurl.com, for example."
More usefully, Watchmouse has created a public URL shortener status watch page - which, if you click on any of the shorteners, will take you to more detailed graphs about how it's going. Bookmark it. You might want something to do while you wait for that Facebook link to resolve.
