Tuesday, October 13, 2009

URL shortening gets wild

Does the world really need another URL shortener? Apparently, the U.S. government thinks so. It just launched http://go.usa.gov as a link shortening service for government employees. It shortens links from any .gov, .mil, or .si.edu site.

Oh no, don't tell me there was somebody who said: "Well, you know, we think that we need to do something in this space, and it looks like the URL shortening is the best thing to apply those several millions from the budget"... And three or four years later, here we go, the Go.USA.gov!

And the usage statistics is so cool too:

Go.USA.gov has shortened 247 URLs that have been clicked 14010 times.

It looks like you missed a couple of zero's and K's, didn't you? Because the site takes more then 17 seconds to open on my sorta fast Internet.

The best of luck though. The US gov't is really going for IT nowadays, and this at least is cool.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost