Google announces its own URL shortening service, goo.gl

Google is a company that seems to be getting itself into an increasing number of markets daily. The last couple of weeks have been especially busy, with many announcements made. Today, another was made, regarding its new & free URL shortening service, goo.gl, for use within its other products.

URL shorteners are great for services like Twitter, where characters are counted in posts, or for when a fully-sized link would look rather out of place. There are a very large number to choose from, but at the moment, there are only a few very popular ones (such as bit.ly). Google's new offering is only available through its own products, according to the blog post on the subject, but it comes with a few benefits, listed below.

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.

It's arguable as to whether or not those points provide a big gain over other services, as the more popular ones tend to have those exact features anyway.

The proper link for the site, goo.gl, has nothing much to offer (as the service is limited to a couple products), but you can test out the Google URL Shortener (the official name) by using the Google Toolbar or FeedBurner.