Google Is Shutting Down Its Goo.gl URL Shortening Service (engadget.com)

Google is replacing its URL shortener service, goo.gl, with Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) as of April 13th. These new smart URLs will let you send people to any location within iOS, Android or web apps. Engadget reports: You won't be able to create new goo.gl short links after the 13th, but existing users can manage them via the goo.gl console for the next year. After that, all the links will still work, but you won't be able to access the console itself after March 30th, 2019. Google suggests creating FDLs from now on, or using other shortening services like Bitly and Ow.ly.

Comments

That won't break the internet at all...

[johannesg]

Two things you shouldn't do on the internet: rely on URL shorteners (because they remove human readability from URLs, add an extra unnecessary lookup, and rely on a service that may randomly disappear), and rely on Google (because anything they make may randomly disappear).

Don't use their office tools. Don't use their programming languages. Don't use their online storage. Don't use their email service. Don't even use their bloody search engine. Sooner or later they get tired of it, and it will disappear without a trace.

Re:That won't break the internet at all...

[VanessaE]

I'll have to disagree a bit:

URL shorteners do have at least one valid use: if you're short on space into which a URL can be inserted, either because of some imposed limit, or because of etiquette of the medium, such as one's signature in a forum post or email, and so long as you have some degree of control over the content the use will get when following said link. On one forum site I use, my signature contains several links, which all point to other pages on the site, all for resources I created or maintain. Those links would otherwise greatly overflow the signature editor's limit, because that editor counts characters in the raw text, not the "rendered" result.

As for Gmail, let's face it, it's been around long enough (14 years) that it's become pretty ingrained for business and personal use. It ain't going away. As far as I'm concerned, it's safe to use, provided you're smart about it and use a real email client to access it, i.e. with claws-mail or similar, downloading your emails via POP and keeping local copies. Even if Gmail goes away tomorrow, you still have all of your data (minus whatever you haven't fetched yet), so you can just switch to some other service, and send updates to your contacts as needed.

The rest of your post is good advice, in any case.

Re:That won't break the internet at all...

[angel'o'sphere]

GMail is heavy linked to Google Docs, and that has lots of fancy automation via G-Scrip. Companies offer business solutions based on document management.

I doubt that ever will go away.