The order of battle for Google this week seems to be on URL shorteners. This has been quite a trend on Twitter and Facebook with various third-party URL shortener sites offering this kind of service. But while others offer it as a stand-alone service, Google is taking the URL shortening thingie on a different approach – via Feedburner and Google Toolbar.
As mentioned by the a post from the Official Google Blog, Google’s URL Shortener is offering a service based on the following:
- 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.
To use Google’s URL Shortener, you need to have either Google Toolbar. When you share a website or blog via the Toolbar and you selected Twitter, the link will automatically be shortened when posted as a tweet. It works similar to other URL shortener that you have already used in Twitter before. The shortened URL always begin with “http://goo.gl/”
For Feedburner, the URL shortener feature offers something else aside from letting you share links. You can try this out by going to Feedburner Publicize Tab’s Socialize service. Then add the Twitter account to which you would like to post items from your Feed. After doing this, you can either start sharing all your feeds to Twitter or customize which feeds you want to share to Twitter and how exactly you want them to look like when you send them as a tweet.
Google said that URL shortener is currently being tested yet. Hence it was rolled out as a feature of Google Toolbar and Feedburner. But they are planning to make it available as a stand-alone product once they’ve proven it to be useful. I’m pretty sure it will soon be available on a wider audience pretty soon.
