Google and Facebook join URL Shortening Game

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In an awesome article on TechCrunch titled “Bit.ly Just Got Fu.kd: Facebook And Google Get Into The Short URL Game” we know know that Google has launched Goo.gl which is a URL shrinking service to be used solely by Google based applications and services.  Facebook will probably develop their own propriety URL shrinking service and now Bit.Ly which still is one of the best URL shrinking services and heavily used on Twitter will face some stiff competition.

Unfortunately this sucks for the users of the various social media services out there, as you can no longer get your analytics and tracking from a single source.  It would be nice if Google opened its URL shortening service to everything including Twitter, Ping.FM, Plurk, Facebook, Digg and more.  By keeping it proprietary to its own services it makes it more of a pain to track analytics from shortened URL’s.  I already have to log into Bit.ly, Hootsuite and Su.Pr to track my various clicks and metrics for the week, I am going to be even more annoyed if I have to log into Facebook and Google to track additional shortened URL’s.

Users should have the choice of choosing a “default URL shortening” service and it be used for all applications, but this mean the URL shortening service needs to be large enough and popular enough and the company must push to have it included as an option in as many products as possible.

Whats next, Google Search results showing you the shortened URL instead of the full URL of the site hosting the page you are looking for?  That would be terrible not knowing what page you were clicking on to find the information you were looking for.

-Dragon Blogger

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