Google URL shortening not ready for prime time in Firefox
You know the global domain name system is not the perfect solution for today's modern Internet when an entire cottage industry evolves around masking it, removing the dot-com and making URLs more portable. TinyURL.com helped pioneer that market years ago, but since that time, bit.ly has become the official shortening service of Twitter, where small URLs are the most precious commodity. Competitor tr.im still struggles to compete there, as its trimmed URLs are automatically replaced with substitutes from preferred partner bit.ly.
It's into the midst of this "market" that Google jumped yesterday, with the creation of goo.gl. (Lucky Greenland.) The leverage Google was supposed to offer was integration of its service into the latest builds of Google Toolbar.
Problem is, it's not working...at least, not as of early Tuesday evening, Eastern Time. In Betanews tests with the latest build (see the Fileforum link above) for Firefox, using the latest version available for Firefox (3.5.6, which should be made official later this week), selecting a service such as Twitter from the Toolbar's Share menu causes the entire URL to show up in the sharing location, with the entire title bar contents from the shared page by default.
The same method used with Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer works as intended. There is no Google Toolbar or equivalent yet for Google's own browser, Chrome.
The news may come as a bit of a breather for bit.ly, which yesterday unveiled its genuine attempt to build a business model around URL trimming. Customers of the new bit.ly Pro will be allowed not only to use customized, trademark short URLs, borrowing global top-level domains where appropriate (for example, nyti.ms), but also have access to analytics services that track Internet users that use those custom URLs in shortening.
In the interest of full disclosure, betane.ws is no stranger to such techniques ourselves.