• Go.USA.Gov! Our Taxpayer Money Hard At Work Shortening URLs.

    Erick Schonfeld

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

    Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

    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.

    For instance,
    http://go.usa.gov/llX
    takes you to a page on Nasa’s site with some nice satellite imagery showing the Fall colors in Wisconsin. And
    http://go.usa.gov/liO
    is a link to http://www.Recovery.gov (I think you save two characters n that one). The idea is that if you see one of these short links you know it is coming from a government employee, which doesn’t exactly make it official but is supposed to make it more trustworthy.

    When you see a go.usa.gov tweet, it will be like getting a messge directly from Uncle Sam, or rather, one of his minions. But I mean, really, can’t they just use bit.ly like everyone else?

    With commercial link shorteners such as Cli.gs and Tr.im falling by the wayside, maybe the government will start a short URL bailout next. Go.USA.Gov!

    (Hat tip to Anil Dash)

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