Google has launched a new URL shortening service that they claim is more stable, secure and faster. This service is going to compete with market leaders like tinyurl.com and bit.ly. Welcome to goo.gl.
How Google is going to change the world with its own mini urls is not clear right now, at least to my eyes. But it did not want to be left out of the widely popular service. Almost every one who uses micro blogging site Twitter would know what good is a short url. If you aren’t aware of this short url thing then, just for your information, this is a way of making links smaller. (some thing like http://www.mashyep.com/2009/12/contributor-twitter-testing-business-features/ becomes http://bit.ly/5EW47e )
According to the official Google Blog, this service being hosted on Google’s global infrastructure, will be synonymous to –
- Stability: Google’s scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.
- Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
- Speed: At Google we like fast products and we’ve worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We’ll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.
- Share feature and URL shorteners on Google Toolbar
But this is not some thing you can use to shorten your image locations or posts you want to share independently. Goo.gl is not a ‘stand-alone’ service. It just works as a background url shortening service for the new share feature on Google Toolbar, and Feedburner. They say if this service receives public accolades then they might consider making it a open service. Till then we can share form the toolbar.
