Bookmark http://goo.gl/. It’s going to come in handy, trust me.

I’m sure you’ve heard of TinyURL and Bit.ly–these are popular URL shortener websites.  You can copy and paste a long URL into them and they spit out a shorter URL for you to use.  They are especially helpful if you’re an avid user of Twitter, a social platform that restricts you to 140 characters per tweet.  Though it’s been available since last December living in the Google Toolbar, Google’s URL shortener is now available for the general public through its very own website appropriately named goo.gl.  “We don’t intend to overload goo.gl with features, but we do want it to be the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web,” says Google.  “With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products.”  And here’s the best part.  If you sign in with your Google Account, you can keep track of all the URLs you shorten; “public, real-time analytics data, complete with traffic over time, top referrers, and visitor profiles” are at your disposal to view.  Oh, and one more thing.. You can add .qr to the end of any shortened URL to transform the link into a QR code (which can be read by many smartphones and other devices).  How neat is that?

[Via GoogleSocialWebBlog; TechCrunch]