Google Releases URL Shortener, may help Wave

Google just recently announced the release of their new URL shortening service, goo.gl, and Facebook appears to be testing their own too, fb.me. Yup — of course we wouldn’t ever need any more URL shortening services.

Nonetheless, URL shortening services have taken the world by storm. These services simply generate short URLs that redirect to the long URL. TinyURL (among others) pioneered this concept, with bit.ly quickly outdoing others, providing stats (i.e. clicks and other information) for bit.ly-shortened links. Thanks to these services, users can send small URLs to their friends, instead of gigantic paragraph-like links.

Twitter has probably brought the most popularity to URL shortening services; users have to be able to share links and other information in under 140 characters. Considering Google and Facebook are entering the URL shortening service market, that tells us just how important Twitter is.

Here’s how all of this helps Google Wave though: goo.gl works with the Google Toolbar. That means it won’t be long before it works with Google Wave too. This is important because Wave already generates monolithic URLs that only a computer programmer could appreciate.

In sum, this means that, if goo.gl is integrated with Wave, nicer and shorter URLs will be generated to waves. This means people can Tweet about what their waving. Bingo!

Instead of Google eliminating Twitter altogether, they decided to take the back door in and effectively replace tweets with links to waves.

We’ll find out what the fullest extent of goo.gl means together…