Goo.gl url shortener is free and open to the public.

Over on the Google Social Web blog, there is a post about the Goo.gl URL shortner now being open to the public and available for use to every one. There are many other types of URL shortners out there, used primarily for shortening long URL so that they take up less characters in the 140 Character world of twitter.
However, Google states that their focus is on quality links and speed. This way you will know when you see a .GL shortned link you know you will be protected from malware, phishing and spam. They use the same technology that is used in their search to assist with this process.

Matt Cutts also chimed in with a quick Q&A for those interested in using the service. This was posted on his blog:

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. Here’s what the analytics page looks like for a recent link I tweeted, for example:

Q: Is goo.gl an “X killer”?
A: No, goo.gl isn’t an effort to kill anything. I think the whole “product X will kill product Y” meme is getting a little threadbare. We needed a url shortener for Google itself. And then lots of people asked for this, so we’re opening our own url shortener to the world. Different url shorteners have different philosophies; I view the goo.gl philosophy as running a tight, fast service without piling on a ton of features.

There is even a Chrome extension that you can use which makes it real easy. I may have to try this as I seem to be using Chrome more and more every day. I just can give up all of my SEO tools in FireFox just yet to make Chrome my primary browser.

Until the day comes that I make the switch to Chrome as my primary browser, I will probably stick with my bit.ly account since it is already built in to CoTweet, which I use to manage all of my twitter accounts. Maybe CoTweet will add Goo.gl integration in the future?