Making URLs shorter for Google Toolbar and FeedBurner
This morning, we launched updated versions of the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner that offer a new URL shortening service from Google called the Google URL Shortener. We mentioned our URL shortener as a feature in both announcements …
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch extends a distribution habit Google has run for years through its browser add-on — the previous major Toolbar upgrade shipped back in January 2006 — but the payload this time is infrastructure rather than features: a first-party URL shortener wired into both Toolbar and FeedBurner.
The timing reads as an industry-wide land grab for the link layer: TechCrunch framed the news as a direct shot at bit.ly, the shortener of record for Twitter-era sharing, while Inside Facebook reported Facebook separately testing its own fb.me shortener. Two of the web's biggest traffic sources are choosing to own short links rather than rent them.
First-order effects
- Toolbar and FeedBurner users get built-in shortening with no third-party dependency, meaning links shared through either client now flow through Google's redirect infrastructure instead of a standalone provider.
- bit.ly, the incumbent singled out in TechCrunch's coverage, faces a competitor distributing an equivalent service for free inside two widely installed Google clients.
Second-order effects
- FeedBurner publishers' outbound links migrate onto Google's domain, concentrating clickstream and referrer data that independent shorteners previously captured — data directly useful for spam filtering and quality signals.
- Facebook's reported fb.me test points the same direction: platform owners bundling their own shorteners squeezes standalone services toward paid analytics niches or obsolescence.
Third-order effects
- Short URLs stop being a standalone product and become a bundled feature of whichever platform owns the sharing surface, shifting the economics from serving users to owning the link graph.
- If consolidation around Google, Facebook, and a shrinking set of independents holds, link permanence becomes hostage to platform strategy — anyone building on a corporate shortener inherits that company's incentive to keep or kill the redirects.
The trend: Single-purpose web utilities are being absorbed as free bundled features by platform owners competing to control the link-sharing layer.