Where were you when goo.gl shutdown?

Summary

11 August 2025 "… all of this ended up in storage rooms, and everything became rotten and full of holes, and he himself finally turned into some kind of hole in humanity." ✪✪“…все это сваливалось в кладовые, и все становилось гниль и прореха, и сам он обратился наконец в какую-то прореху на человечестве.” — Google Gogol, Dead Souls Vol. 1, Chp. 6 In December 2009, Google launched a URL shortening service alongside an update to their toolbar and FeedBurner. TechCrunch heralded the new service as the “Stablest, Most Secure, And Fastest URL Shortener On The Web” in an article released at the time. Those words — stable, secure, fast — weren’t chosen by an overexcited editor either, they appear on the goo.gl website on day one. Smash cut to July 2024, when Google announces in a blog post announces that their super stable and secure URL shortener is getting nuked from orbit in just over a year. *Curb theme plays* Now, I know I’m framing this as a completely unforseen outcome, a surprise betrayal, but the truth is that folks knew this would happen from the get-go. Scott Gilbertson wrote this in an article for Webmonkey/Wired covering the services introduction in 2009: Of course the bigger problems with URL shorteners — link-rot, spam and redirect mishaps to name a few — are still problems regardless of whether the shortener is controlled by Google or anyone else. And for anyone who thinks that Google services have a better chance of being around far into the future, may we remind you that Google Notebook, Google Answers and several other services have disappeared over the years. Prescient, right? The fact is that URL shorteners which don’t share their database (read: all URL shortners if you round up) are a terrible, no good, very bad idea. Link rot makes us amnesiacs, and if our history is our future, it’s looking very hazy. The Resistance Time and time again, moments before the ossified arches of a website are set to crumble due to active neglect by the arsonists on payr...