SillyElf74

December 14, 2009 at 5:33pm

I installed the new toolbar with the URL shortener earlier tonight. It allows you to post your shortened link to 56 different web services (Twitter, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Fark, Friendfeed, and StumbleUpon to name just a few).  You can reduce the number of sites by going into the setting and checking off which services you want to display when you select the Share button.  It's nice that Google verifies the site you are linking to is not malicious, but unlike Bit.ly there are no analytics to see how many people clicked your shortened URL.

The story claims the Goo.gl URL shortener is faster than other services that do the same thing, but I have a tinyurl extension for FireFox that shrinks a URL in 1 click and adds it to the clip board for easy pasting. It takes all of 2 seconds to complete. I've also been useing the Bit.ly shortener more often these days. I do have to open my bookmarks to open up the Bit.ly side bar, so I suppose Goo.gl may be faster than that.    

 I think I'm going to stick with Bit.ly for now mostly because of the click tracking it provides, but I'll give the Google URL shortener a chance.