goo.gl And The War For The Clickstream

Google is taking steps to become the major URL shortener, by adding a website for their solution, goo.gl.

This is an obvious attempt to take the high ground in the curious stratum of URL shorteners; a layer of the web made necessary by the rise of microstreaming applications like Twitter, where the space limitations put a premium on brevity.

[Disclosure: I am a consultant to Bit.ly, and have a financial interest in the company.]

Muthu Muthusrinivasan, Google URL Shortener Gets a Website

There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. 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. Since our initial release, we’ve continued to invest in the core quality of the service:

  • Stability: We’ve had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we’ve worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust.
  • Security: We’ve added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail.
  • Speed: We’ve more than doubled our speed in just over nine months.

And of course, Google wants the very best, up to the millisecond information to inform its algorithmic decisions about what ads to place on the page they are sending you to.

The market leader in the space has been Bit.ly, for some time. Early leading options have fallen to the wayside, like cli.gs and tr.im, as it became clear that the costs of managing a URL redirection capability could be high and the returns low (or non-existent) without a capacity for large scale and some way to make money off the information lurking in the clickstream. Note that Google’s announcement implicitly plays to the fear that some tiny start-up might not be around to serve the click weeks or months later; but Google certainly will.

I was involved in the formation of 301works.org, which is now a project of the Internet Archive, intended to backstop URL shorteners, so in case a URL shortener go out of business their clicks can still be served up. But even as the director of that effort, I realized that it was a stopgap, an interim solution, awaiting market maturation. After all, once billions a day of short URLs are being clicked, there is so much value in learning what is being clicked on an aggregate basis that end users would be presented with a choice of large, stable URL shorteners — like Google, Twitter, and Bit.ly — none of which are likely to go out of business.

And the clickstream is where the realtime analytics are lurking: who is clicking what right now. This is what Bit.ly and now Google have been aggregating, and this will be informing real-time trend analysis in the future.

Many have said that URL shorteners are evil (like Joshua Schachter), because they introduce overhead into every click, and they also increase the likelihood that such clicks might fail, because the service involved with resolving your www.cli.gs/8762ji2 link may no longer be around. 310works.org, goog.gl, and Bit.ly solve some of the issues involved in this argument, but not entirely.

But the battle will be around speed and analytics. No one, especially a large publisher or online retailer, wants to have a huge slowdown on every click. However, their backend servers are designed to do very slow aggregation of click data — my Google analytics account shows me yesterday’s data today, for example, which is completely unusable for publishers or just-in-time inventory planning.

And of course, Google wants the very best, up to the millisecond information to inform its algorithmic decisions about what ads to place on the page they are sending you to. Not just based on the old sort of clickstream — the series of clicks made by an individual that leads her to some page on the web — but the new sort of clickstream: all the clicks that are being made by the world, or perhaps better, by the corner of the world that comprises my network. That would inform the best ads, the best search hits, the best user experience for each individual.

Google has added some neat extras:

via www.twitter.com/mattcutts

Secret goo.gl easter egg: take a link like http://goo.gl/LFwS and add “.qr” to get a QR code! See http://goo.gl/LFwS.qr

There is also the question of the UX in general — and I see that goo.gl has adopted one of the best features from Droplr, a tool I use everyday. Specifically, when I create a goo.gl URL the application places the URL in my Mac clip buffer, so I can paste it wherever I’d like. Bit.ly supports edited posting to Twitter, but I find myself working around that a lot of the time, nowadays. Here on stoweboyd.com and on my Underpaid Genius blog, for example, I have integrated Backtype javascript so users can see the number of references to the posts, and clicking on thise figures opens the corresponding page on BackType, showing the twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc, references.

This last feature is something that goo.gl does not provide today, but I expect they will be. In fact, BackType would be a perfect acquisition for Google in their war for the clickstream.

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Short URLs in Academic Citations?

Catherine White recently brought this question to my attention, as a result of her using Bit.ly links in a citation for an academic paper she’s working on:

A bit off topic (my nod to the social ‘rules’ of thesis-post blog replies ;-) if such exist. I suppose by this I am indicating my ‘correct’ socialization, but begging your indulgence for an exception) but is there a citation style that allows bit.ly-encoded URLs? To me, it still seems a bit odd to see these in a medium where they provide little benefit. Are they regarded as a permanent method to reference the sources? Just curious.
RonM on July 5th, 2010 at 12:20 pm

Her response:

RonM, thank you for your comment. I chose bit.ly simply because the urls were really long and it just made my footnotes look neater on the page. Original draft was in LaTeX. I spoke to Stowe Boyd earlier this week and he told me bit.ly links are all being archived and are permanent – right Stowe?
cathcw on July 9th, 2010 at 10:52 am

My feeling is that it should be acceptable to use shortened URLs in citations. A few pros:

Descriptiveness — They are not necessarily any less descriptive. Consider Catharine’s post, which has the illuminating  URL of “http://www.justwhitenoise.com/?p=1059”. In fact some shorteners let you provide a distinctive name in the URL, like “http://sto.ly/noisyidiotdilemma”.

Analytics — Shorteners often have some click count capabilities, or maybe even stronger analytics, so the author can track references to the articles they cite, which is simply not possible otherwise.

Shortness — As Catharine points out, shortened URLs are short, which is meaningful on the printed page just as it is in Twitter. Incredibly annoying URLs — like the ones created by Google maps — simply have to be shortened to be used productively.

And a few cons:

Domain Obscurity — If the original article was posted at the New York Times, that bit of information is lost if it winds up as a Bit.ly link. However, many publishers like the New York Times are providing their own URL shorteners, so a link like “http://nyti.ms/a6hO6J” retains that domain clarity, however. Although in this case, the author loses the analytics.

URL Shortener Shutdown — There is always the possibility that a URL shortener service could cease operations. The NY Times shut down NYTUrl.com after ‘abuses’ by users, and as a result, any URLs created by that service are now unusable.

In 2009, I was involved in the formation of 301Works.org, a non-profit dedicated to ‘backstopping’ URLs, and where I serve as director. The idea is that participating URL shortener companies — which includes Bit.ly, and many others — will back up their URL mappings — the pairs of long and short URLs — so that if they decide to shut down the service 301Works.org (a project of the Internet Archive) can step in and provide the redirection for users.

My recommendation is that anyone planning to use a shortened URL in a permanent way, as in the citation of a paper, might want to a/ retain the long version of the URL, and b/ make sure the URL shortener service is a member of 301Works.org.

In the final analysis, all URLs are impermanent. Magazines and periodicals may go out of business, or change their URL structure. Blogger can rehost their blogs, changing their URLs. Or pages can simply be deleted. Avoiding short URLs would not get away from this fundamental law of the web.

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