Short and Sweet

For those of you who post a lot to Facebook and Twitter, you know how valuable a URL shortener can be, a website that shortens long web addresses so that they fit into the alloted space. Goo.gl, Google's URL shortener, has finally been given a website -- once there, you can shorten links and view real-time analytics of every short link you've ever created.

The site itself is plain, like most of Google's offerings, but the real-time analytics page is nothing short of fantastic. You can break traffic down by hours, days, weeks, months and all time, and see the total number of clicks, and from which referrers. At the bottom you can see the "visitor profiles," which shows you a breakdown of countries, browsers, and operating systems.