Google’s URL Shortener Matures. Will You Switch?

URL shorteners have been making their expansion on the web over the past few years with the growing Facebook and Twitter communities, where you may want to share a link with friends and family. Shared links can be very long and take up a lot of text if you’re limited to only 140 characters, like Twitter, thus making URL shorteners ideal. Only last September did Google jump into the URL shortening market and has already been widely adopted since its inception.  Many users have submitted requests to add new features to goo.gl and now they’re being answered. Google has added three new features to their URL shortening program:

Copying to Clipboard

Instead of having to highlight text after a URL is shortened all you have to do is hit control + C to copy the text, since it will now be automatically highlighted.

Removing Old Links

Your dashboard can become full of pages and pages of shortened links, some which you really don’t care about anymore. Now you have the ability to clean up the clutter in your dashboard by “hiding” links. Hiding a link will not remove the shortened link, but rather just remove the visual representation in your dashboard.

Spam Prevention

URL shorteners are often used for spam sites to hide bad websites from someone. Now you have the ability to report these spammy links to Google so that it will help them keep down the amount of spam links and websites that show up in goo.gl.