Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links

I&#x27;m partial to ShadyURL: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.5z8.info&#x2F;start-trojan_u9a9hm_aohell.exe" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.5z8.info&#x2F;start-trojan_u9a9hm_aohell.exe</a>

I wonder why Google is reusing the Firebase brand so much? It doesn&#x27;t really fit with messaging (GCM -&gt; FCM) or links, among other functions. Seems like an odd choice, even if the backend infrastructure&#x2F;team is the same.<p>Reminds me of Microsoft reusing &quot;Surface&quot;, or prepending &quot;Live&quot; to everything once upon a time...

Probably a good chance to inject this here:<p>You can build your own private URL shortener with AWS Lambda, for a dozen cents a month [0]. I&#x27;ve made some modification to it so that it supports customized short name, but the changes are trivial to implement. You could (should?) also probably consider a short domain name to pair with it, but those are also cheap ($10&#x2F;yr, perhaps depend on the TLD).<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;compute&#x2F;build-a-serverless-private-url-shortener&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;compute&#x2F;build-a-serverless-priv...</a>

Total guess here: In addition to having two products that do the same thing, I&#x27;m guessing they may want to distance themselves from goo.gl links since a shortened URL with that domain somehow seems associated with Google and seems more legit (as opposed to, say, a bit.ly or ow.ly link.)

In regards to the shortener replacement, it might be nice for app developers, but as a user, I loathe when a link that can go to a website tries to bring me to the app install. I don&#x27;t want to install your likely crappy, less featurefull app.

Google should give the whole dump of the redirects to the Internet Archive (or at least stop banning their crawlers) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;301works" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;301works</a>

This has been poorly handled.<p>I got an email for my company yesterday with one of these links.<p>Being security conscious, I hovered over the link and suspected a phishing attack.<p>Given I work in finance, this was the only prudent move I felt I had.<p>Google is going to see a lot of that over the coming weeks if they can’t improve their communication on this.

URL shorteners accelerate linkrot.

If you want a free OSS URL shortener for your own domain name, I built a simple one at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xluh.co&#x2F;repo" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xluh.co&#x2F;repo</a>. Will be expanding on it in the future.

Since they will be continuing to honor existing redirects, do they gain anything by disallowing new redirects? If it is engineering effort they want to save, they can just stop developing new features, right?