Shortener space just got the air sucked out of it
by bear
Legacy shorteners like TinyURL and Metamark were quickly joined by many others (bit.ly, is.gd, tr.im) when TinyURL started having service issues and people realized (finally) the pain of link rot. Other issues were also a lack of preview (to prevent porn or other malicious redirection) and basic stats.
Along the way, Twitter “blessed” at first TinyURL but then moved to bit.ly when bit.ly started offering some serious backend stat love to it’s users and also started working on active spam/malicious link removal.
But now, all semblance of balance has been removed from the playing field as both Google and Facebook have announced their own url shorteners.
It is interesting that Google’s goo.gl isn’t open at all. Instead it’s just a tool for users of the Google Toolbar or members who use their blogging service. I wonder if this is temporary or will Google start to try and drive customers to their silos so they can add to the data collected.
Some things I would have liked to have seen are
- open API
- integration of shortened url stats with Google Analytics
- a preview option, even tho Google is working on security, i still want to avoid being rickrolled
- Google participating in the Internet Archive project for URL Shorteners: 301Works.org
Hopefully this is just a “oh crap, Facebook is announcing” reaction, but even that would be new behaviour for them.