Google’s URL Shortener Becomes Public

Google’s URL shortener service goo.gl has become public and anyone can use this for shortening their URLs. The URL shortener gives some interesting stats about the shortened URL and seems to be pretty good. Earlier goo.gl was not public and nobody could use it for URL shortening purposes. Google’s plan to publicly provide access to this URL shortening service makes it much easier for the users to share, tweet and email interesting links.

To avail this URL shortening facility you just need to login with your Google account and you can start shortening and sharing links. This shortened URLs and its click analytics are public and can easily be shared by anyone. In the dashboard you can see the list of the URLs you have shortened and when you drill down further to see the details you can see data which makes it easier to analyze your URL stats.

Some of the major stats shown by Google’s URL shortener service are
1) The number of clicks
This is the number of clicks a particular URL has received.

2) Referrer details
This is the data showing from which sites or tool the clicks came.

3) Country
This shows the name of the country from which the clicks came.

4) The browsers used
This showed details on the browsers used for sharing and bringing clicks on the shortened link.

5) The OS platform.
This shows the Operating system that was used for sharing the shortened URL.

When considering the amount of analytics data that goo.gl is providing it is a notch above other major URL shortening services. It has been hardly a day since this URL shortening service was made public, but when I went through my Twitter streamlines, I was able to see a large number of users using Google’s URL shortener service. It seems that the other URL shortener service providers need to come with some enhancement to stay ahead in the competition.