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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.
Animal or vegetal shortening?
I, for one, will be avoiding this. Existing services work fine and this is one more way Google is headed towards info omniscience.
"Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use."
Aside from twitter and SMS which both have self-imposed limits, what's the point of these things?!
I, for one, will not be satisfied until my URLs are compressed as a super positions of themselves and stored in qubits.
Perhaps Google can use one of their quantum computers to appease me.
In the days(read decades) of "cut and paste", I really fail to see the real need for URL shortening, other than maybe sending a nice link to a goatse mirror to an unaware "friend" at work.
Sorry, it's kitschy at best. And no, it doesn't "unclutter" jack shit. Learn to insert a damn hyperlink within your text already(yet another decade-old solution to this non-problem). Most input these days is HTML friendly anyway.
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
Websites wouldn't be tempted to use such long URLs if search engines would stop using the URL (other than the domain name) as a factor in ranking the search results. How many CMSs now stuff an entire article title into the URL purely for SEO purposes? Is that stuff in the URL really telling the search engine anything that can't be found in the <title> or <h1> tags?
This seemed utterly rubbish to me until I put on my Google Goggles. Now everything looks awesome.
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My URL shortening system is called JFGI (or JFBI if you prefer Bing).
Four characters. Beat that!
Btw, I have a submarine patent on the three characters FGI, and also the two character GI, which is more polite, but doesn't have the same level of exasperation with the recipient.
The big win is that you can safely use the above system at work, whereas because shortened URLs are inherently masking the destination, you cannot trust such a link, and thus must therefore never click on it in a work place, in case someone has linked to something abhorrent and vile, like foxnews.com.
Timothy didn't say it, unless you're accusing him of putting words in eldavojohn's mouth - the quoted bit is (meant to be) written by the submitter, not the editor. Assuming he didn't change it, Timothy wrote "eldavojohn writes" and "Google's shortening service is called Goo.gl."
And there *are* privacy concerns, Google is doing this to mine it for information, that's what they do. It's hardly the end of the world though - don't like it, don't use it.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Well you could always start a Nigerian company called bi.ng ?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So, that's how Google Gibraltar looks like... It's funny how the official meaning of TLD is always totally ignored. Case in point: as many others, White House uses bit.ly for its URL shortening on White House Tweeter posts... never mind that .ly TLD is assigned to Libya.
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
Well you could always start a Nigerian company called bi.ng ?
Great idea. You'd probably make US 20,000,000 million dollars and need to find some helpful person in a Western country to move it out of Nigeria. I'm sure you would be willing to pay a 10% finder's fee.
There are common alternatives, someone just needs to write the plugin. ChromeMUSE (which I patched an improvement for for my own use) uses LongURL.org to do its replacement. If you want to stick with Firefox then all you need is someone to write a wrapper around that (and for LongURL.org to keep updating their list of supported sites with all of these other sites people make).
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