Goo.gl url shortener is now open to everyone

Matt Cutts @ Google answers:

Q: Why are you doing this?

A: Google needed a url shortener for its own products where we knew the shortener wouldn’t go away. We also wanted a shortener that we knew would do things the right way (e.g. 301/permanent redirects), and that would be fast, stable, and secure.

Q: Why open it up to the public?

A: Initially we launched it only for Google to use on things like the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. It only took about week before someone dug into the toolbar to see how the shortening code worked. One popular Chrome extension showed up within a few days and now has almost 70,000 installs. Clearly, a lot of people wanted to use goo.gl themselves.

Q: Fair enough. Any cool new features?

A: The main feature is that you can use goo.gl just by going to the web page. But if you go to http://goo.gl and login with your Google account, you’ll get analytics and history features for the urls you’ve shortened.

Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/goo-gl-url-shortener/

Related link:

URL shortening (Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening

The link goo.gl does not load here, looks like a frozen redirect.

(my google account is always active)