IT angle
there's clearly too much of an IT angle in here: to the slightest bit of a marching powder reference!
Google has followed in the footsteps of Twitter by buying a Colombian internet address to use as a corporate URL shortener. Mountain View announced yesterday that it now owns g.co, which will only link to its official Google products. Twitter owns t.co, so Google's latest domain purchase is clearly intended to be added to the …
Should Twitter, Google and their customers (ie the advertisers, not you) really be that interested in people who are too stupid to type in a proper URL?
I become really depressed at the weekend when I witnessed somebody I know to be a constant facebook user start IE and get to the facebook site by typing "facebook" into Google (it's her home page) and clicking on the first link. That was stupid enough but this URL shortening thing looks even worse - how is it actually going to make anything easier for anyone? What exactly is wrong with remembering and/or bookmarking some proper URLs anyway?
If you have 140 characters for a post on Twatter, and you use 100 or more of those to post a URL you won't get to say much. Also, if you're posting it on your blog it's going to word-wrap like a bugger on phones and the like, or even get broken up on some devices.
As someone above pointed out, if you're just trying to get to a site or remember its URL then "theregister.co.uk" is a lot easier than g.co/ubv8457sh.
"If you have 140 characters for a post on Twatter, and you use 100 or more of those to post a URL you won't get to say much."
That's a fault of twitter 140 characters is jusy way to small and twitter shouldn't couldn't these as characters bit wrap it into a <a ....>[title of page it links to]</a> and then all problems are solved