Twitter changed how links work recently, so now when you click a link the first thing that actually loads is something like:

http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=STUFF

I don’t like it.

First off, it’s messier. Instead of clicking through normal links now we’re getting redirected for internal links. That’s weird.

Second, it puts another level of failure and slowness between users and the places they’re trying to reach via the links. It looks like the redirection/tracking is only happening for internal links, so if twitter is down then the link would probably be down anyway, but I feel like things are a little slower anyway with the intermediate step.

Hmm…