I know there's a plethora of URL shorteners these days, and most platform providers (eg: Twitter) are introducing their own so they can harvest analytics themselves. For whatever reason though, I keep trusting Google with all of my most personal information. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but I have a feeling this will become my standard URL shortener just as Google Apps has become my standard for email, invoicing customers, document management and scheduling. Not to mention Google Reader for having information on all the RSS feeds I visit and Google's search knowing what links I am visiting daily, and probably thirty other products I'm using that stores my information on their servers.
Nice simple public stats: <a href="http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu#two_hours" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu#two_hours</a><p>Not a huge fan of the flash chart though.<p><a href="http://goo.gl/Jvhu" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/Jvhu</a><p><a href="http://goo.gl/Jvhu.qr" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/Jvhu.qr</a><p>EDIT: Better graph
Is it just me, or was I able to "shorten" an already goo.gl shortened url?<p><a href="http://goo.gl/fBUb" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/fBUb</a>
--> <a href="http://goo.gl/Bkmv" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/Bkmv</a>
--> <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com</a><p>They don't want to allow this, do they?
Ugh. Google entering this pretty much wipes out the space - companies like bit.ly are going to need to work on seriously differentiating themselves from the pack, and even then I don't think they're long for the world.<p>I can honestly say I hope to never be in a market - or working on a product - where google suddenly decides to enter the game. Even if their offering sucks, or is broken, it sucks all the air out of the room because it's OMG Google.
I wonder what the web will be like in 10 years when most of these URL shorteners don't exist anymore and we're just left with a web full of links that go nowhere. I'm sure the Google one will survive, seems like we shouldn't have to use these URL shorteners at all though.
There are a couple of Greasemonkeys to lengthen shortened URLs. Hopefully they will be updated soon.<p><a href="http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=expand+URL+shortener&x=0&y=0" rel="nofollow">http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=expand+URL+shortener...</a>
Just out of interest - do the top level DNSs look at the entire address or is Greenland's main internet supplier going to melt under the load of redirecting everything to Google?
goo.gl has been around for quite a while. Is there something new I don't see here?<p>Edit: Ah, its website is just new. Here the original post: <a href="http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html" rel="nofollow">http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-short...</a><p>There was already a Chrome extension since the beginning.
Its obvious that we need shorteners, the original purpose being email but Twitter bucked that trend.
So now, what we dont need is more URL shorteners. What we do need is more sites to implement their own shortening like YouTube and Flickr (eg, <a href="http://youtu.be/3jDfSqtG2E4" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/3jDfSqtG2E4</a> and <a href="http://flic.kr/p/MGuRJ" rel="nofollow">http://flic.kr/p/MGuRJ</a>). Its all about the rev canonical. This way, a shortened URL will stay about as long as that site is about and the internets doesn't break.<p>People seem to want click stats though, although i dont see why you cant get these out of google analytics etc.<p>Check out <a href="http://revcanonical.appspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://revcanonical.appspot.com/</a> for more.
[edit - Nevermind, solved below in the comments.]
Does anyone know how these work long-term? This one shortens a URL to 4 characters, so for a potentially major URL shortener, there is a relatively low number of possible outputs.<p>Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most inactive ones?<p>For shorteners that give consistent shortened URLs (i.e. everytime you shorten the same input URL, you get the same shortened output URL), how do they deal with hitting their maximum?
In all the excitement, we forgot to ask about the API. I am curious what they will provide, and with what limits.<p>One big problem I had with bit.ly on Twitter is there was no way to get all shortened URLs pointing to a "real" URL. This was a problem because I wanted to search for references to the "real" URL.<p>The lack of that feature of course empowered dedicated services like backtype (I suppose), who have special deals with Twitter so that they can get all references.