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BookmarkURL shorteners have been used for several years now and becoming increasingly popular as social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have seen tremendous growth.
Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:
* Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
* Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
* Speed – fast resolution of short URLs
Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.
The Google privacy policy applies to the Google URL Shortener. Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.
Facebook’s URL shortener is used mainly in its mobile interface. The fb.me URL also appears to be a replacement facebook.com when typing in vanity URLs. For example, my Facebook URL is http://facebook.com/kimberly.kimbrough. Visitors can now reach it at http://fb.me/kimberly.kimbrough.
The fb.me URL shortening is also appears to be automatically used for users and brands who have set up their Facebook account to post to Twitter. Facebook will be rolling out the ability to post to Twitter directly from the publishing tool in Facebook. There are third party apps that provide this service but Facebook is hoping it takes off using its URL shortener.
Several sources on the web say that bit.ly and ow.ly are the best shorteners to use. And they also advise to stay away from tinyurl.com.
I regularly use bit.ly because of it’s ease of use and it keeps track of the number of clickthrus. Ow.ly is widely used although I had researched it several months ago and found that there were several bad reviews.
Some leading services such as cli.gs and tr.im often experiencing downtime or even threatening to shut down altogether, taking existing short links with them.
bit.ly
ow.ly
su.pr
is.gd
301.to
cli.gs
twurl.nl
ff.im
tr.im
tumblr.com
blip.fm
twitpic.com
tinyurl.com
Since goo.gl and fb.me are not standalone URL shorteners, bit.ly can take a deep breath for now. But I would be a bit concerned if a large dynasty like either started pushing a product that competes with my services.
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