The new Goo.gl service is a direct attack on Bit.ly, a URL shortener developed in-house at Betaworks Studios, a New York technology incubator. Bit.ly has fast become the de facto link shortener on Twitter and many third-party Twitter clients, and the service even raised a $2 million round of venture financing from investors that included Alpha Tech Ventures along with Mitch Kapor, a software industry pioneer, and Ron Conway, an early Google investor.
What I find really interesting is that the way so many of the people I follow online share content is changing so quickly. Long form blog posts have been replaced by short URLs and a bit of commentary — probably posted via a bookmarklet. We used to write big long posts with big long URLs to push people around. Now it seems the quick burst of information sharing is supported by a growing number of services that allow instant, one button publishing.
The fact that Google is getting into this game offers some interesting food for thought — if they can index and analyze more of the real time instant publishing on the web they can do more. What I will want to see is how this competes with bit.ly as it relates to the real time tracking I can do on my links — if I post anything from bit.ly I can watch the close to real time clicks. No idea if the google variety will do that. I will be curious to see how any of that will integrate with the rest of the google suite of tools I use on a daily basis. No idea quite yet.
Hi Cole, thanks for the post. While Goo.gl is currently internal to feedburner and other Google properties right now, I would expect it to expand shortly (no oun intended) to the consumer space. I can imagine your Goo.gl usage stats showing up in your Analytics dashboard – this I think is why posts like the one you reference call out bit.ly as the “target” – since they were the first shortener to offer good stats on click-thru rates for shortened URLS.
Distracted aside: Come to think of it, shortened URLS are like the real-time-web equivalent of splash pages – while once serving a real purpose, they’re now there mostly to capture click-through stats. Sigh.