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Goo.gl: Shorten URL, generate QR codes and get analytics

Google’s URL shortener that was launched last December, has just opened it’s doors to the public. Now you can just say meh! and move on, or stop to investigate it. As the title of this post indicates, Goo.gl can do a lot more just shorten URL.

Since their initial release, Google’s URL shortener has been integrated into many Google products including News, Blogger, Maps, Picasa Web Albums, and Moderator. From today, people can directly use it from the website http://goo.gl/.

Googl

But why use Goo.gl?

Stability: Goo.gl has had 100% uptime since their initial launch, and the team has been working to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust.

Security: Google’s automatic spam detection comes into play once again. This is the same spam filtering technology that keeps spam away from your Gmail inbox.

Speed: Google says that they have doubled their speed in just over nine months.

On top of that, you get all the goodies that few service provider provides. This includes detailed analytics of how many clicks your shortened URLs has received over weeks and months. These are real-time analytics data, complete with traffic over time, top referrers, and visitor profiles.

You can even generate QR codes quickly for any URL. To do that simply add “.qr” to the end of any goo.gl URL. Scanning this with any QR code reader will take you to the URL.

qr-instantfundas

So, for example, the URL http://goo.gl/VEOQ is the shortened link for this blog. If I change it to http://goo.gl/VEOQ.qr, I get the above image. [Thanks TechCrunch]

Alternatively, you can click on the Details link after you have generated a shortened URL to get the QR code.

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