We have written about how url shorteners have become very important after the advent of microblogging and especially the rise of twitter. Now it seems the url shortener wars have been taken to the big stage by two bigwigs of the Internet space. Both Google and Facebook have chosen the same day to announce their respective url shorteners.
Facebook has launched a really short fb.me url shortener while Google has launched Goo.gl. Facebook url shortener is not only active for Facebook urls but also facebook profiles and fanpages. Try fb.me/watblog and fb.me/rajivdingra . While google announced via its blog that it has launched a new url shortener and integrated the same with services such as Feedburner and the Google toolbar. Mind you almost all the blogs these days have a feedburner feed and this move could inturn affect Bit.ly which was gaining in popularity for being the prefered url shortener.
But atleast they have spared bit.ly by not launching Goo.gl as a standalone url shortener service which means that you can shorten any url you want with the Goo.gl but you would either need to have a feedburner feed or google toolbar installed. Facebook on the other hand has done a limited launch of its url shortener service even though its been in use via its mobile interface for sometime.
Bit.ly which is the largest url shortener service has reacted to Google and facebook’s announcement by launching a custom url shortener service for publishers. This means publications like Nytimes could have its own nyti.ms with all the features of bit.ly. This is in many ways taking the use of url shorteners to a different level.
All in all it seems the shorty’s are a war with each other and suddenly being short is pretty cool if you are a url. Not so much if you are a human though 
hehe, why forget youtu.be …..
yeah ! youtube also enters the short url bandwagon !
but still youtube links are longer ! so not much difference !