Per­for­mance results for the tested URL shorteners

The guys over at Watch­Mouse did a really inter­est­ing com­par­i­son: The set a bunch of URL short­en­ers against each other to see how good they really are. Watch­Mouse mon­i­tored 14 pop­u­lar URL short­en­ers for a month and took a long, hard look at avail­abil­ity and speed. Inter­est­ingly enough, only goo.gl and twt.tl were always avail­able dur­ing the test­ing period.  In terms of speed, Facebook’s fb.me ist by far the slow­est of them all and goo.gl reigns supreme.

Also, it seems that only a few of the short­en­ing ser­vices opti­mized their DNS servers for inter­na­tional use. If you’re in the same coun­try as some of the ser­vices have their servers stashed, you can look up the IP address half a sec­ond faster than an inter­na­tional vis­i­tor. In addi­tion to these find­ings, Watch­Mouse fig­ured out that bit.ly’s pro ser­vice – a paid ver­sion offer­ing more options – is slower on aver­age than the free counterpart.

Per­son­ally, I don’t use URL short­en­ers because I like to see where a link gets me. There are a few add-ons and/or user­scripts for Fire­fox to keep you on the safe side though, by expand­ing short­ened URLs. Any­way, if you can’t avoid the use of such a ser­vice check out the new web­site the guys from Watch­Mouse have set up: the site pro­vides real-time sta­tus reports for URL shorteners.