Does the world need another URL shortener? REALLY? Google thinks so. So earlier this week it announced a new URL shortening service, Goo.gl, available at http://goo.gl/. (If case you’re a country code geek like me, .gl is the country code for Greenland.)

If you visit the site you’ll note that you can’t actually use the shortener. At the moment it’s limited to the Google Toolbar and Feedburner, if you use FeedBurner’s “Socialize” option to send your feed to a Twitter account.

So what’s the big deal about Google’s URL shortener? Google’s publicizing three points it considers important: stability, speed, and the ability to prescan Goo’d sites and warn if a shortened URL is pointing to something Google considers unsafe/dangerous. The prescanning sounds great; unfortunately the shortener will not be available outside the toolbar and FeedBurner unless “the service proves useful.”

In the meantime? For URL shortening services, I rather like bit.ly http://bit.ly/.

EDIT: Apparently someone has managed to create an extension for Chrome that uses the Goo.gl URL shortener. I haven’t tried it. It’s at https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/iblijlcdoidgdpfknkckljiocdbnlagk.