Jay Hollingum - Works in IT

After some waiting around since goo.gl went live and became available to the general public in September 2010, the API has finally been released this week. Documentation can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/urlshortener/overview.html and a "Getting Started" guide can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/urlshortener/v1/getting_started.html There has been eager anticipation waiting for the release of the API and this should be pretty cool for allowing developers to use Google's URL Shortener in their own applications and projects. Thanks to Google and the URL Shortener Team for releasing this. Blog post announcing release:  http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-url-shortener-gets-api.html

There are hundreds of URL shorteners around these days such as bit.ly tinyurl.com moourl.com tiny.cc  and ow.ly with the bigger websites even creating their own URL shortening services. Now Google have stepped in to the ring with their own URL shortening service, goo.gl . Although goo.gl URLs have been appearing in Google products for some time, they have only just released a website for shortening any URL. The blog posting announcing the release can be found on their social web blog at http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html . Given the resources behind Google, this will probably be one of the most stable and secure URL shorteners, and is unlikely to go the way of some such as tr.im .