Google Sees Advantage With URL Shortener Goo.gl
Unlike the competitive URL-shortening services, which run on standalone Web sites, Goo.gl runs off of Google applications. Google said Monday that it may eventually make Goo.gl a standalone site, too, but would judge how third party Web sites adopted Goo.gl as a link shortener.
"If you're not familiar with them, URL shorteners basically squeeze a long URL into fewer characters to make it easier to share with others. With character limits in tweets, status updates and other modes of short form publishing, a shorter URL leaves more room to say what's on your mind — and that's why people use them," wrote Google software engineers Muthu Muthusrinivasan, Ben D'Angelo and Devin Mullins in a Monday post to The Official Google Blog.
According to Google, Goo.gl is baked into various Google services like the Feedburner RSS service and Google Toolbar for Web browsers, on which users can now find the Goo.gl function as they would any other Google tool.
With Goo.gl, Google is tapping into a niche services market gaining popularity with use on sites like Twitter, and other places where large, cumbersome URLs need to be presented in smaller bites. It's an idea consistently taking hold. Social networking giant Facebook also launched a URL shortening service this week, called FB.me.