When you visit the goo.gl homepage, this message appears:<p>> Starting March 30, 2018, we will be turning down support for goo.gl URL shortener. From April 13, 2018 only existing users will be able to create short links on the goo.gl console. You will be able to view your analytics data and download your short link information in csv format for up to one year, until March 30, 2019, when we will discontinue goo.gl. Previously created links will continue to redirect to their intended destination. Please see this blog post[1] for more details.<p>[1]: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-google-url-shortener.html?m=1
> To refocus our efforts, we're turning down support for goo.gl over the coming weeks and replacing it with Firebase Dynamic Links[1] (FDL).<p>Hmm, so replacing something simple and straightforward with something incredibly complicated aimed at a different use case...<p>[1] <a href="https://firebase.google.com/products/dynamic-links/" rel="nofollow">https://firebase.google.com/products/dynamic-links/</a>
PSA: You can make your own (relatively) shorter URLs if you're willing to guess at how to un-pretty site's URLs. My most common one is Amazon. Most URLs are amazon.com/dp/xxxxxxxxxxxxx. Knowing that you can take a nasty URL like:<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B00EHBERSE/ref=sr_1_3?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1524489624&sr=1-3&keywords=wd+red" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B00EHBERSE...</a><p>and change it to:<p><a href="https://amazon.com/dp/B00EHBERSE" rel="nofollow">https://amazon.com/dp/B00EHBERSE</a><p>That's 122 chars to 32 chars. This kind of tactic works for tons of sites.
This decision makes no sense to me. Why would Google pass on all of this free analytics data? They also use subdomains of goo.gl for a ton of their own products. Google Maps shareable links are maps.goo.gl, for example.
I used to use this to share my teaching material with my students from Google Drive, giving them a short and friendly URL seemed the most efficient way of sharing the material (Age varies between 18 - 99). Well, I don't know what I'm going to use now, probably tinylink, but somehow never liked 'em
The decision was so poorly communicated that even A Google Product like the campaign url builder no longer works. And I didn’t really understand why I’d use Firebase for shortening an url and after clicking on the page I’m more confused than ever. So... back to bit.ly ...
FYI I created a quick tool for this at <a href="http://xluh.co/repo" rel="nofollow">http://xluh.co/repo</a>.<p>It's basic now but I'll be building it up in light of this.