Nifty site/tool: Shorten and Share Links with GO2.me

in connect, site reviews, social media, twitter by faryl on December 12th, 2008No Comments

GO2.ME is a link-shortening service which evolved from a Google Hack-a-Thon project in Seattle in August, 2008. Link-shortening (also called URL-shortening) services are useful when you want to share a link somewhere that limits the number of characters you can use (Twitter or text-messaging, for example) or just to avoid sending one of those loooong links (think google map directions) in an email.

As described by its developer, Mike Koss:

GO2.ME combines the functionality of a URL-shortening service, with other social bookmarking features that have interested me (social ranking, community commenting, and feedback). I was also interested in experimenting with very light-weight interfaces, and particular “command-line” style text interfaces for attributing comments to users, and adding tags.

The social bookmarking features are how GO2.ME differentiates itself from some other link-shortening services such as tinyURL or zz.gd.

This link (http://go2.me/CC) shows an example of how GO2.ME incorporates some of these features:

Comments

Pages accessed through GO2.ME links contain a toolbar on the top where people can leave comments. This is a nice option for those who may not use FriendFeed or want other ways to initiate a conversation when sharing sites through services such as Twitter.

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Stats

Stats show how many people are viewing your links, if it’s been shared, how many comments it’s received and other details. (Useful information for those who may be interested in what types of links are most interesting to the people you’re sharing them with.)

Profiles

If you choose to register your user name (called your “nickname”; GO2.ME uses Google Accounts for signing in), you can view your profile to see a summary of all your shared links. This means GO2.ME could be used for bookmarking. It also means if you click on a link and find it interesting, you can see other sites the person who sent has previously shared. For the privacy-conscious, GO2.ME can be used without creating a profile.

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Tags

GO2.ME includes a tagging feature. To create tags, simply list key words inside brackets (“[sample tag])”. The most popular links for each tag are listed in their own page. For example popular links tagged with “video” can be found here: http://go2.me/tag/video.

Short and Sweet

GO2.ME links are only 16 characters long. For those on Twitter, this leaves an additional 124 characters for your tweets. Non-Twitterers can also benefit from GO2.ME’s URL structure; Mike has taken measures to make links easy to manually type (vs. copy & paste) by eliminating homoglyphs (characters that look like other characters, such as the number one (“1″) and lower case “L”) from the result options.

There is also a bookmarklet that can be used to easily create links (or GOAT them, as Mike likes to call it) from your browser’s tool bar.

Features I’d love to see added would be the ability to specify your link name (tinyURL has this option) and to be able to share the generated link directly from GO2.ME to sites such as Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed (similar to the functionality the “share this” button provides). I’d also love to be able to search for links based on how they’ve been tagged.

The site is still fairly new (I believe it first officially launched in October) so these features may be planned for future release.