The blog of Abraham Williams

When the @ Google URL shortener originally debuted it was internal only. It initially had no web interace, no statistics, really not much of anything. While used mostly for @ Feedburner and the Google Toolbar a few creative hackers where able to reverse engineer the shorten API. Several months pass and Google has publicly launched the service with a fully working web interface. Also available are click through stats and and a history of links generated with your account. Google had this to say about the official API: ...we wanted to let you know we do plan to release an official API for goo.gl in the future. You’ll be able to use the API to shorten URLs, expand URLs, and view analytics from directly within your own applications. While poking around the web interface I discovered the shortening of URLs was happening with a simple AJAX request. No complicated algorithms needed. The exact request is a POST to http://goo.gl/api/shorten with a paramater of url set to the URL you...

Post to Twitter from Feedburner , originally uploaded by 4braham . Google's Feedburner recently rolled out a new feature allowing you to automatically push new posts from your feeds to Twitter accounts. Not only does this shows Google's intent to further integrate with the services you use but that they want to do it to the best of their ability. Interesting aspects of Feedburner's Publicize options. Include link The interesting part of this is it uses http://goo.gl as the shortlink. Goo.gl is going to be one of the longest lasting shortlink providers ever. Leave room for retweets Automatically shortening the title to leave space for retweet text. This could be improved by scaling the extra space based on the length of the Twitter username. For example "RT @ abraham : " takes 13 spaces including the space but Feedburner left 27 in my test post . I suspect the number varies depending on word lengths so as to not include partial words. Use inline h...

Google's new Firefox Toolbar offers a URL shortening feature using http://goo.gl as the domain. Using Charles Proxy I looked into how the Toolbar gets gets these shortened URLs. The Toolbar makes a POST request to http://goo.gl with 3 parameters: user, url, and auth_token. Parameters user=toolbar@google.com Email address of service requesting shortened URL. I assume Feedburner would use feedburner@google.com. url=http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/15/2772467.htm URL being shortened. auth_token=793185282022 Apparently not time based as a single URL would generate the same value for each request. I glanced at the extensions javascript generating auth_token but I don't have time to completely figure it out right now. Unfortunately goo.gl was having some issues as the requests were failing with 405 errors and "HTTP method POST is not supported by this URL" messages. I will work on it more once the Toolbar starts successfully requesting goo....