Slashdot Mirror
Google Unveils goo.gl URL Shortening Service
eldavojohn writes "The Sultan of Search is unveiling a new service (currently only available for Google Toolbar and Feedburner) that will tackle a very old problem usually solved by bit.ly or tinyurl — URL shortening. Now, we've heard cries for sanity to prevent potential issues (like what if tr.im had shut down and broken millions of links?) but with one of the goliaths of the industry jumping in the ring it looks like URL shortening is here to stay. And a quick note for people who enjoy privacy, goo.gl explicitly states: 'Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.' You didn't think Google was going to sit back and let bit.ly harvest juicy data on 2.1 billion links that were clicked in November without trying to corner some of that action to make their ad suggestions more accurate, did you?" Google's shortening service is called Goo.gl.
"Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use."
People are obsessed with shortening as much as possible, but I like meaningful URLs that tell me about the contents that's linked to.
http://decenturl.com/ does the job perfectly: http://search.slashdot.decenturl.com/google-url-shortening-service
thats not only for search engines.
It's really handy to see where a link is going!
bickerdyke
Long links in twitter messages significantly reduce the amount of available characters.
Root cause analysis. This is a "solution" to a problem that shouldn't exist anyway. Use hyperlinks. Others have only been doing it for years now.
I hope you mean What Goo Greenland looks like.
Google Gibraltar would be google.gi
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Quite how popping up a page stating the service was busy is any easier than just issuing a redirect to the required site I don't really know
Issuing a redirect to the right place requires access to the database, issueing an error message does not.
P.S. if you are running a website please help reduce the need for url shorteners by using sensible urls.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Any of these services has the potential to provide tracking on your usage of the web if they really catch on. Sometimes a bit of paranoia isn't a bad thing.
Here's one single firefox add-on that displays the full url in a few different ways (href/status bar, mouseover, expanded link): http://www.longurlplease.com/ J
.gl is Greenland. Gibraltar is .gi.
Good URIs are just a good idea, period. That's not advice from some shady SEO scumbag, either. That's tim berners-lee and the w3c.
Surely:
http://example.com/articles/man-bites-dog
is vastly superior from the user's point of view to:
http://example.com/cgi-bin/article.php3?PHPSESSID=0983sdf0er888fsd&article_id=73522
Which one are you going to remember? Which one would you rather read over the phone?
This will tell you: http://preview.tinyurl.com/yew8dpl
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
You can also set a cookie at tinyurl.com that will remember you prefer to preview your URLs.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)