Facebook & Google enter URL shortener market

URL shorteners, like bit.ly, have become a popular way for people to share links on Twitter while taking up as few of the allotted 140 characters as possible.

Saving you characters is just one of the benefits that shorteners provide. A major feature is traffic analytics so you can see how many people are sharing links from which sites. The market leaders in the URL shortening market have been tinyurl.com and bit.ly but it looks as if they are about to get some serious competition from Facebook and Google.

A URL shortener makes increasing sense for Facebook as the site is trying to be more open and connected to other websites and internet devices such as Apple's iPhone. Fb.me is their new shortening service and can shorten URLs for Facebook images and pages, ie www.fb.me/creativehub will take you to our new Creative Hub Facebook page, making it easier for us to share the link on websites like Twitter.

The company has made Facebook Connect a focus this past year, introducing ways for people to sign in to other sites using their Facebook identities and share information back and forth between those sites and Facebook. It has also been pushing users to be more open, most recently changing its privacy settings to get people to make content they share on Facebook also available on the web and ready for when Google Launches Real-Time Search. It’s possible that the company will make fb.me the default for any content that users share publicly, in the hopes that the shortened URLs make for easier re-sharing. It would also not be surprising to see Facebook provide analytics around shortened URLs, especially for Page content so page owners can track web-wide sharing.

Google has launched it's own service called goo.gl. At the moment it is only being used for Google Toolbar and Feedburner. Google announced the service as a sharing feature of Google Toolbar that will let you share a webpage directly from the toolbar. For now the service is not available as a stand alone service but it is hard to see it not being rolled out eventually and linked with Google Analytics to provide feedback for site owners.