Update: Corrected Title.
Love them or hate them, whenever the Google Gorilla jumps into the web pond, they are bound to make waves (drowning out rivals big and small).
Not too long ago, Google announced that FeedBurner (a service they bought a few years ago) has launched the ability for bloggers to tweet their feed links directly to Twitter using Google’s new URL shortener, goo.gl (hat tip: TechCrunch)
(Google AdSense for Feeds) Many of our publishers who have tried our Google Analytics feed item link integration have already noticed that their most popular feed items have been shared many times on Twitter.
We’re now taking our distribution and analytics a step further by enabling the ability to automatically publish the feed items that meet your criteria to Twitter, using the Google URL shortener at goo.gl.
Despite being a Google fanboy, I am saddened by this move as it certainly means the death of Twitterfeed, one of my favorite tools outside of world known as Google.
While Twitterfeed is awesome at tweeting your blog links in a timely fashion (at least within 15 minutes), with the release of Pubsubhubbub (or as I like to call it, “real time RSS”) by Google, Twitterfeed has now been put on the endangered species list.
The same also might be true for Bit.ly as well (a service I have also come to love), although the small startup is not going down without a fight (hat tip: TechCrunch again).
(Bit.ly Blog) Today we’re pleased to announce a new service: bit.ly Pro. The Pro service provides custom short URLs powered by bit.ly. Publishers and bloggers will be able to use their own short domain names to point to pages on their sites. […]
When you see a short URL like nyti.ms, you know the destination web site before clicking on the link. The service includes all the bit.ly features users and publishers have come to expect. Placing a simple “+” at the end of any bit.ly link (including these white-label, bit.ly-powered links) takes you to real-time information about that page and how it is being shared: how many people clicked on that particular link, where they came from, and more. For publishers, the new service allows them to keep their brand visible while maintaining access to bit.ly statistics.
While this premium option may help Bit.ly to become profitable, the real time data feature may make it invaluable compared to Google’s “day old” Analytics (which last I checked does not offer live stats).
Betaworks (who has invested in Bit.ly, Twitterfeed and Twitter) is hopefully cooking up a strategy to confront the Google Borg (and save both Twitterfeed and Bit.ly), but as for right now it looks like our new Google Overlords may have just squished another company in their conquest for web domination.
