Shortener space just got the air sucked out of it

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.


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This entry was posted on December 14th, 2009 and is filed under mutterings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

 
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  • Sounds like Google is once again taking food out the small peoples mouths....eg...tinyurl....smh
  • Sad to see Google starting to do what Microsoft did, move away from core business and tread on everyone else's business space.

    This ultimately leads to a lack of innovation because the big vendor gets complacent and the small innovators loose heart.

    One saving nugget is that at least Google launches a real product that sort of works, MS continually announce and deliver late without meeting expectations.
  • With the list of products that have been produced and died from Google you would think that they would have collapsed under their own weight by now. The only thing that I can think of that is preventing it is that, unlike Microsoft which keeps their R&D hidden away in a completely different division, Google's R&D is the entire company and they have no fear about launching and failing.
  • It also shows us that no matter how big an organisation is there's no guarantee that a good piece of technology will hit the big time, look at Jaiku, much nicer than Twitter but died and got 'thrown out' to open source land...
  • Very true, good point. The painful part of Jaiku, IMO, is that just when the team was starting to seriously get some momentum in that paradigm they were acquired and then distracted/deflected from the work that would have put it over the top. Same thing with FriendFeed team and Facebook.
  • It's the 'keep the shareholder happy' effect, they need to keep doing 'more' to generate higher stock prices = value = good dividends.

    There aren't many of us (like Cleartext) that just want to work in a niche, have a comfortable lifestyle and aren't either looking for an acquisition or float :)
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