Google’s URL Shortener – with a barcode twist

Exciting News! The Google URL shortener, goo.gl is now available for everyone to use, I can’t wait.

Actually, the goo.gl shortener has been around for a quite a while and is really just one new entry into a field with some existing good solutions. Personally I use bit.ly and ow.ly for my URL shortening jobs.

However coming from the company that gave us such great products as Google Docs and Google Analytics (as well as duds like Wave and Buzz) there are a couple of nice features included.

The first is Google Analytics integration. Let’s face it, we all want to know how many people are clicking our links to visit our latest literary masterpiece.

The other twist is that the short URLs have a QR barcode feature. Just copy the short URL into your address bar and add .qr to the end of it. Hey Presto – the URL is instantly encoded into a QR Code that you can use as you see fit.

There is a lot of buzz (no, not Google Buzz!) around 2D barcodes right now so this feature is rather cool.

What do you think? Are you excited by this? What URL shorteners do you guys use?

Updated (10/14/2010) Good news (if you want more QR codes) – the well established bit.ly URL shortener now does the same trick. Just like the goo.gl flavor, you just need to put the short URL in your address bar and add .qr to the end.

Isn’t technology wonderful?