Google stuck one of its far reaching tentacles today into another tech pie, adding “URL shortener” to it’s jack-of-all-trades resume.

The new service, goo.gl, isn’t available for straight-up URL truncating yet- you have use it through Google Toolbar or Feed Burner. But if the service proves popular, unlike the immediate flops GMail, Google Docs and Google itself, goo.gl will be opened up for “broader consumer use.”

Google is selling the new URL shortener on three points:

Stability: Google’s scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.

Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.

Speed: At Google we like fast products and we’ve worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We’ll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

Google wasn’t the only one getting all up in bit.ly’s grill today- Inside Facebook pointed out that the social networking site is automatically truncating links to fb.me. That also works for Facebook pages, so facebook.com/Etsy works if you just go to fb.me/etsy.

Google gets into the URL shortener game is a post from: The Inquisitr

Just as cement is the glue that holds together the bricks of our homes and businesses those URLs we click on everyday at the glue that holds the Web together. Without those interconnecting links the Web literally wouldn’t exist. The problem with those links is that they are often exceptionally ling and in a language of their own – or so it seems sometimes.

Prior to the advent of social media services like Twitter URL shortening services were a rare breed with the big name in the field being the easily recognizable TinyUrl. Since the explosive growth of Social Media and services like Twitter the URL shortening service has exploded as well. For a while there it didn’t matter where you turned, it seemed as if a new URL shortener was being announced. For every Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed clone that was created there was yet another URL shortener following on its heels.

Then we find out the other day that one of the more popular shorteners, Tr.im was going to be shutting its doors and at some point at the first of January, 2010 links created using the service would no longer work. The company behind Tr.im claim that once Twitter had made Bit.ly the default shortening service for Twitter the game was over for anyone else in the field. Then there was the whole problem of monetizing the project – there was none.

This lead to the main page of Tr.im displaying a “close of business” notice of which this was a part of

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further devleopment since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

Source: Mashable :: Tr.im URL Shortener Shuts Down; Short Links to Die?

Since that point though Nambu, the parent company of Tr.im, has relented to the public outcry against the closure and re-instated the service:

We have restored tr.im, and re-opened its website. We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the popular response, and the countless public and private appeals I have received to keep tr.im alive.

We have answered those pleas. Nambu will keep tr.im operating going forward, indefinitely, while we continue to consider our options in regards to tr.im’s future.

So a minor disaster has been averted for the meantime but that doesn’t mean that we won’t see this event being repeated and sooner rather than later.

I am sure that some will say so what it’s only Twitter and it’s users that will be affected should these shortening service go belly up. Well they couldn’t be more wrong as the use of URL shorteners have spread far beyond just Twitter. Blogs are using them, Facebooker’s are using them, web forums are using them. In effect these shortened URL are becoming the new cement that is holding the web together and their use is increasing on a daily basis across all areas of the web.

If there is one weakness the Web has it is these URL shorteners because as the team at Tr.im quite rightly pointed out keeping all those servers that are behind these services running is an expensive proposition

tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough. We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential. tr.im pushes (as I write this) a lot of redirects and URL creations per day, and this required significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate.

Now Tr.im is only one of a great number of shortening services out there being used daily and if they are having trouble justifying the cost of maintaining a service that isn’t bringing in an income imagine all the other shortening services as well. It is inevitable that at some point these services are going to disappear and while Bit.ly may be the darling of Twitter at the moment and have some sort of business plan beyond just shortening links the same can’t be said of the rest of the services like them.

So what happens when these shortening services begin to disappear and the links they are responsible for begin to break down, because it will happen. Slowly but surely we are going to see portions of the web turn dark – unreachable – because the links that lead to them no longer exist. It might not be too bad if one or two URL services go under as I am sure we’ll survive but things like this have a snowball effect and it could turn out that the very things we used to make the web more accessible could in the end be the very thing that tears it apart.

Paul Short, my writing partner here at The Inquisitr, suggests that rather than using some third party shortening service bloggers should seriously consider rolling our own. I can see the rational behind that idea but I’m not sure that is the answer either, although one I’ll be looking into, but either way the reliance of URL shorteners is something that could have serious repercussions and it won’t be pretty.

The future Web – Broken is a post from: The Inquisitr

One of the biggest dangers surfers are facing on the web these days is the incredible proliferation of URL shortening services like TinyUrl, bit.ly, and countless more. While they do provide a valuable service they also can be used by cretins that want to try and trick users into going to malware type sites. It wasn’t until the increase of services like Twitter though that this potential danger really gained any ground.

Word has it today though that Twitter has turned on URL blocking that will not let shortened links that lead to malware sites to be posted. This was first noticed by security firm F-Secure and is now being widely reported throughout the blogosphere – as it should be.

As Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb points out this service is probably being provided in conjunction with a third party as the cost to Twitter to maintain the needed database of constantly increasing threats would probably be more than the service could sustain.

Since the company has not made any official announcement about the new protection, it’s unknown at this time if Twitter is using a particular service to provide the lookup capabilities for the malicious URL identification or if they are managing this process in-house. If we had to bet, though, we would go with the former. Maintaining a current "block list" for malicious web sites would be a major undertaking for the startup. It’s more likely they’ve partnered with a security company of some sort to provide this service or are using a publicly available API, such as Google’s Safe Browsing API, which checks URLs against Google’s blacklist.

Source: ReadWriteWeb :: Twitter Starts Filtering Malicious URLs

The only drawback to this is that this parsing of URLs only occurs if posting from the actual Twitter page rather than third party clients. Now other than bit.ly none of the other URL shorteners provide the same kind of protection so really this ends up only being a half-measure.

But I guess a start is better than nothing. Now if the rest of the URL shortening services would climb on board.

Twitter has your back as it begins blocking nasty URLs is a post from: The Inquisitr

With the proliferation of social media services the use if URL shorteners has escalated to a point that you can’t turn around without another one popping up. Everyone and their brother it seems whants to be a copycat Web 2.0 service and what easier one to pick that some silly assed URL shortener. One would hope that at some point the thought would sink in that maybe – just maybe – we have enough ways to shorten and track a URL.

It would appear now that the newest riff on this disease on social media is for us to create our own in the hope that this will cancel out the fear that if some URL shortening service goes down it won’t leave dead links that should be pointing to your site ending up instead looking like littered used water bottles across the web. Hell even my good buddy Mark has rolled his own URL shortener and while I’m sure he has his reasons I can’t figure out why we need even the number of shorteners we already (sorry Mark ).

A lot of fuss was raised recently over a new breed of URL shorteners hitting the web when Digg released its Diggbar that wraps your site within their frames code and provides a URL shortener as part of the deal. This is similar to what Facebook has done with their web based toolbar and follows along with what Hootsuite, a toolbox of goodies for Twitter users, does with the integration of the ow.ly URL shortener. Now we find out today that even The New York Times has gotten into the act with their own shortening service.

As I thought about writing this post I wondered just how many URL shortening services there were out there so I did a couple of quick searches and this is what I came up with

Doiop
TinyURL
ReadthisURL
MemURL.com
dwarfURL.com
http://snipurl.com
http://shorl.com/

Is.gd
Snurl
Snipr
NSFW.in
QurlyQ
icanhaz.com
Tiny.cc
URLenco.de
bit.ly
PiURL.com
LinkBee.com
TraceURL.com
Tweetburner
rubyurl.com
tnij.org
abbrr.com – Spanish
fon.gs
2big – German
twurl.cc
Knol.me
Tr.im
Bloat.me
cli.gs
Short.ie
kl.am
POPrl
idek.net
budURL
DiggBar
buzzup
chilp.it
krz.ch
shortna.me
ow.ly
zi.ma
nn.nf
rt.tc
sn.vc
lnk.in
pnt.me
yep.it
23o.net
fly2.ws
ne1.net
w3t.org
www.x.se
Xrl.us
Short.to
Notlong.com

http://metamark.net/
http://shurl.org/
6url.com
canurl.com
decenturl.com
easyurl.net
elfurl.com
fire.to
flq.us
freak.to
ix.lt
krunchd.com
miklos.dk
nanoref.com
qicute.com
piurl.com
rurl.org
shorterlink.com
shortlinks.co.uk
shorturl.com
smarturl.eu
tighturl.com
tinylink.com
urlcut.com
urlhawk.com
urlpass.com
yuarel.com
xaddr.com
yatuc.com
yweb.com
UnHub
Lnk.by

91 different URL shortening services and that was only after looking for about half an hour, most of which was spent copying them to the list. It’s like URL shorteners has become the new “Hello World” for wannabe web developers.

The problem is all they are really doing is creating a potential black hole of broken links at some point in the future. While some like bit’.ly have been able to con convince some VCs that there’s money to be made in all those shortened URL the vast majority of them will assuredly disappear. As they do they will be leaving a mess behind them but unfortunately like herpes there will always be some new shortening service popping up.

All this doesn’t even take into account the obvious abuse by spammers, phishers and virus writers that things like URL shorteners will allow. As we become blindingly use to clicking on all these shortened URL because of things like Twitter and other social media services it is only a matter of time before shortened URLs blow up in our face.

Update: at the time of posting the URL shortening service from The New York Times has been taken down due to abuse.

Like we didn’t know that wasn’t coming.

URL Shorteners – the herpes of the web is a post from: The Inquisitr