It's not a big announcement, just more of how Google is reaching into every corner of your online activity. Yesterday morning saw the rollout of goo.gl, the link shortener from everybody's favorite search engine.
Of course, Google's more than just a search engine anymore. While that feature still makes up the company's bread and butter, they've expanded well beyond that with email, mobile apps, an Office-like suite of online document software, their book scanning project, the essential Google Maps, RSS reader, Calendar, browsers, operating systems, and on and on and on.
Promising to deliver 3 S's of Stability, Security, and Speed, goo.gl is currently only available through Feedburner or the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer or Firefox. Oddly enough, Google doesn't make the service available with Chrome.
What
they don't tell you also in their news release is how precisely to make the service work. After installing the toolbar for Firefox the first time, we were surprised to find no Share button which
we were lead to believe by accounts would allow us to shorten links. After uninstalling, restarting Firefox, reinstalling, restarting Firefox, we found the Share button.
Clicking on the Share button brought up a list of places we could share links including Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Digg, Hotmail, MySpace, and tons more. So we tried Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, three essentials of our day to day online activity. Not one of them worked, not one of them shortened any links. Shutting down Firefox once more and restarting proved no more helpful, nor did repeating the process of uninstalling and reinstalling. Nor did tinkering with any of the settings prove helpful either.
While we're generally a fan of tons of Google products, this isn't one we think we'll be using at any point. For starters, we're not a big fan of any kind of toolbar add-on. Most are obnoxiously bloated with features, eat up valuable screen real estate, and are aesthetic messes. Toss on damaged functionally and we'll take a big pass on this one.
