The competition among URL shorteners seemed to have subsided, with bit.ly emerging as the leader thanks in large part to support from Twitter. But some big tech players could shake things up -- Google and Facebook are both experimenting with shortening services of their own, called goo.gl and fb.me, respectively.
The point of a shortening service is to transform a long, convoluted URL into a short one. This is particularly useful on Twitter, where long URLs eat up precious characters, but I also see it use in emails and websites, where long URLs just look ugly.
Google has two blog posts today announcing its new shortening service. For now, only users of the Google Toolbar and the company's RSS service FeedBurner can use Goo.gl, though the company says, "If the service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future." Google also highlights three benefits its service offers over most URL shorteners -- stability, security, and speed.
Meanwhile, Facebook hasn't made any official announcements, but it has begun shortening URLs that appear in its mobile interface. As with Google, if this proves successful, we can probably expect to see broader implementation.
Now, URL shorteners aren't difficult to create from a technical perspective, but they can be costly to maintain for a small organization. The shutdown of some shorteners, such as Tr.im, has raised concerns about whether using a shortener will mean all your links become broken in the future. That would be less of a concern with Google and Facebook -- and the perception that we can "rely" on links from Google, especially, could be trouble for bit.ly (not that bit.ly has been particularly unreliable). It will also be interesting to see if the companies decide to contribute to 301Works, an archive of shortened links.
Besides the saved space of URL shorteners, they can provide useful data and analytics about what people are clicking on. Google and Facebook might make use of that data themselves, and they may want to pass it on to customers and partners, such as blog publishers and businesses with Facebook Pages.
[Thanks to Kim-Mai Cutler for contributing to this post. Oh, and the photo is from flickr/Jonas B]