Google, the giant of the Internet, announced a move into the realm of the small Monday: URL shorteners, which condense long Web addresses into very short ones.
“People share a lot of links online. This is particularly true as microblogging services such as Twitter have grown in popularity,” the company said in a blog post announcing the initiative.
The new Goo.gl service is a direct attack on Bit.ly, a URL shortener developed in-house at Betaworks Studios, a New York technology incubator. Bit.ly has fast become the de facto link shortener on Twitter and many third-party Twitter clients, and the service even raised a $2 million round of venture financing from investors that included Alpha Tech Ventures along with Mitch Kapor, a software industry pioneer, and Ron Conway, an early Google investor.
Bit.ly didn’t wait long before striking back at mighty Google. Late Monday, the company announced that it will begin creating custom URLs for a number of Web sites and publishers, including Microsoft‘s Bing search engine, The New York Times, Associated Content, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Onion and Meebo.
The custom URLs will begin rolling out on Bit.ly’s partner sites tonight and continue to deploy over the next several days.
“How we share information on the Web is rapidly changing,” said John Borthwick, chief executive of Betaworks Studios. “Bit.ly aspires to be the most open and scaled platform for sharing available.”
The move could help the company retain its position as the lead URL shortener on the Web. Although the “white label” service is in beta and currently available only to a selected group of participants, Bit.ly said it plans to begin accepting new partners into the program.
Currently, the service is being provided to Web publishers for free, although Mr. Borthwick said the company anticipates eventually charging a fee for it.
Since Bit.ly was introduced, its volume has soared. The company says that more than 2.1 billion Bit.ly links were clicked in November, compared to 11.8 million a year ago.
One feature that has helped the company stand out among a myriad of quirkily named competitors is its real-time tracking of how many times links are clicked and where users are coming from — data that it makes available publicly on the Web. Bit.ly will also offer that data to the publishers enrolled in its beta program and show them how links are trending among Web surfers.
Currently, Goo.gl is only available from the Google Toolbar and Feedburner, the company’s RSS publishing tool, although the company said it may make it available for a wider audience in the future.