Inaction, sloth, moral turpitude
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URL shorterners slow things down
ACCORDING TO Watchmouse, URL shorteners actually slow down web browsing.
Counterproductive this may be, but Watchmouse says it is the norm on websites, and it claims that Facebook, which we already think sucks too much time out of most people's lives anyway, is the worst offender.
It's not all bad news for URL shortening services. Watchmouse said that they do offer benefits, mainly the ability to save space in things like Twitter messages.
However, they also introduce risks, and problems, such as creating a single point of failure, should the service be down, and often need additional load times to open.
Watchmouse monitored the most popular URL shorteners, including those found on social notworking sites, and it found that of them all Facebook's fb.me service was the slowest.
In a blog post the firm said, "[Facebook] 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."
Overall, almost all the URL shorteners have speed compromises, and Watchmouse said that very few have optimised their domain name servers for international use.
It explained, "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." µ
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You forgot to touch on the privacy issue, if you have to go through a central point to get a translated URL they can track your IP (and account and possibly name if the same company does the service) and what sites you visit.
Same trap google came up with when they released their free DNS service.
...isn't it, that URL shorteners introduce the familiar trade-off between convenience and performance? It's quicker and easier for the user to type in, but adds a level of indirection to the process.
recognise shortened URLs and retrieve the long version before the user needs it.
However, this doesn't fix every disadvantage. I think for tinyurl in particular I have it pause on the tinyurl site to tell me where I'm about to go. It may be somewhere I don't want to be.