Google first presented the Google URL Shortener (goo.gl) last December as an attribute of Google Toolbar and Feedburner. Since the first release Google integrated the technology into many other Google products including News, Blogger, Maps, Picasa Web Albums, and Moderator, but there is a popular requirement for a direct way to use the service. Now Google is giving goo.gl its own website (http://goo.gl). Google does not intend overloading goo.gl with features, but they want it to be the most stable, the most secure, and the fastest URL shortener on the web.
With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you're protected against malware, phishing and spam etc..
Google built goo.gl with a focus on quality. Features of goo.gl:
- Stability: 100% uptime since Google's initial launch, and Google have worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even more stabler and more robust.
- Security: We've added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail.
- Speed: We've more than doubled our speed in just over nine months.
Procedure:
Google needed a url shortener for its own products where we knew the shortener wouldn't go away. We also wanted a shortener that we knew would do things the right way (e.g. 301/permanent redirects) and that would be fast, stable, and secure.
You can use goo.gl just by going to the web page. But if you go to http://goo.gl and login with your Google account, you get analytics and history features for the urls you've shortened.
You can also see the number of clicks generated from the URL you've put out and over various time ranges from two hours through the past day, week, month and "all time."
We can use these shortened URLs to post or tweet in many social media sites. Here there is no threat of character limit. If you sign-in to your Google Account, you'll see a list of URLs you had shortened in the past. Click the "details" link next to any of the shortened URL and you'll find public, real-time analytics data, complete with traffic over time, top introducers, and visitor profiles. This can be a great way to better understand who's interested in your links, how they're finding them and when they're reading.
Even without an official API, there are extensions available for browsers like Chrome (eg: goo.gl URL Shortener, Shareaholic for Google Chrome) and Firefox (eg: goo.gl lite). goo.gl isn't an effort to kill anything. Google plans to release an official API for goo.gl in the future. We will be able to use the API to shorten URLs, expand URLs, and view analytics from directly within our own applications.
This article is originally published at Kensium Business Process Outsourcing