Around the Net
Google Thinks Tiny
- PC World, Tuesday, December 15, 2009 1:36 PM
"People share a lot of links online. This is particularly true as microblogging services such as Twitter have grown in popularity," Google said in a blog post.
Why wouldn't Google go in this direction? asks PCWorld's Tech Inciter blog. "Put another way: What won't Google do to a) put its name on something and b) gather more information about users?"
At the moment, Google's Goo.gl is only for Google Toolbar and Feedburner users, but as eWeek notes, there's nothing stopping it from offering the service more broadly, "which could be a scary proposition for Bit.ly and others in the space and points to an ongoing trend of Google trying to mimic other Web services to keep traffic flowing to its search engine and other Web services."
In response to the Google offensive, Bit.ly -- which was developed in-house at New York technology incubator Betaworks Studios -- just announced that it will begin creating custom URLs for a number of Web sites and publishers, including Microsoft's Bing search engine, The New York Times, Associated Content, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Onion and Meebo.
"How we share information on the Web is rapidly changing," John Borthwick, chief executive of Betaworks, tells The Times' Bits blog. "Bit.ly aspires to be the most open and scaled platform for sharing available."
Thinking bigger picture, blogger Russell Beattie asks what implications Google's foray into URL shortening could have for Twitter. "Looking at the options, is Google 'embracing and extending' Twitter?" he ponders. "All that would be needed to cut Twitter out of this loop would be the ability to keep track of updates immediately," he notes, adding, Feedburner already supports PubsubHubbub, which means that any feed they're tracking is already 'real time.'"
