Royal Pingdom asks, is the web heading towards redirect hell? Basically, as link shorteners get joined by large services wanting to track clicks (clicking a link in Google, Facebook, Bing, and soon Twitter actually takes you to an intermediate step on their servers before sending you to the destination, even if the status bar of your browser says it’s a direct link, and then there are the URL shortening/statistic services like bit.ly) we’re going to have more steps on the way to the page you actually want to go to, which as Royal Pingdom notes, adds time to your page loads and creates many more potential points of failure on the way.
Yeah, it’s going to get worse.
When you download mobile apps for services and they include their own web browser, they’ve got the ability to track links not just on their service, but anything you click anywhere. This is probably too much data for the average analytics worker circa 2010 to deal with, but as analysis engines grow in sophistication, marketers are going to be able to play 6 clicks of separation (that’s twice this week I’ve referenced 6 degrees, weird!) between their site and any other, or any site and any other, as long as the browsing experience is within their app. There are some decent advertising opportunities to be had in this space even if we don’t know anything about the user, and guess what, we also know everything about the user…
Depending on the implementation, in-browser click tracking in mobile apps might not cause any of the problems from web redirects, or at least not directly. The problem is that it’ll highlight the need to track web clicks even more to capture this stuff on all platforms.
And mobile apps aside, as services grow, what’s to stop, say, Facebook from un-bit.ly-ing links? Most of these are going to spread through their network virally, so one pre-fetch could substitute the bit.ly redirect for their own, so the net redirect count stays the same, but the marketing data from whoever made the original link is gone. Click warfare could be coming to a browser near you…
Of course, that’s not stopping me from implementing my own custom redirect system later this year. What? I’m as curious as the next person on what links work best, but I’d rather be the point of failure than have a service close and kill all my link love.
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