May 19, 2024

Google and Facebook Launch URL Shorteners

Posted December 14, 2009 at 9:51pm by iClarified · 9207 views
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]