Well in the last week or so, it’s been a big week for… URL shorteners.

To start with, Google have announced that they’re going to be releasing a URL shortener. The domain they will be running this on is goo.gl. If you go to the page currently, Google claims it’s only for google products at the moment. Nobody is yet sure whether (or when) they will release the use of it to the public, but at the moment, we just have to see what Google decides to use it’s shortened URLs for. I’m not fully sure why they’d need to shorten their URLs, Google seems to be pretty memorable and short, and to be honest, I’m more likely to forget goog.gl.

Not only that though, they’ve also released a URL shortener for their YouTube service. This is live right now. If you have a link, such as:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ9thA0bUkA

Then you can use their service by typing in http://youtu.be/jZ9thA0bUkA. This will then redirect you to the video you were looking for. This is absolutely pointless, I really don’t see many people using it. People seem to have got used to the old, traditional YouTube video URLs.

And finally onto the last one – The Facebook URL shortener. Apparently Facebook are currently testing out theirs, which will be put on the domain fb.me, which I suppose is much smaller than the original. I still don’t see this being very popular either, but I’m sure Facebook will make it a viable solution to use.

That is all the main URL shorteners announced recently. I’m still quite baffled how Google, YouTube and Facebook all seem to be getting these URL shorteners at more-or-less the same time.