Google and Facebook Launch URL Shorteners

Both Google and Facebook today launched their own URL Shorteners.

InsideFacebook reports that recently Facebook began automatically shortening URLs that appear in its mobile interface. Now a text link to a Facebook photo appears as http://fb.me/3Bkj7CW where as it used to look like http://m.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=35877484&id=1310743&l=a373e8038d.

fb.me can also be used to access custom Facebook urls. For example, http://fb.me/starbucks would take you to the http://www.facebook.com/starbucks page.



Google's URL Shortener is available via the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. It is not currently available as a standalone service; however, if the service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future..

Google's shortened links look like http://goo.gl/bpVD and offer the following benefits:
* 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] [InsideFacebook]