We’ve been long time fans of bit.ly, which usurped our previous fave tinyurl.com, but now Google has decided to have bash at this URL shortening lark.
Perhaps prompted into action by arch-rival Facebook’s new fb.me URL shortener, Google’s goo.gl service is slowly starting up, although their introductory web page advises that it, “is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.”
The Google Toolbar and FeedBurner syndication service are already using Goo.gl for link sharing, although the search engine giant is yet to say when us mere mortals will be able start, err, goo.gling.
Just to tease you further, the company has laid out the three big selling points of the service, adding that it, “may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.”
- Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
- Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
- Speed – fast resolution of short URLs
