Google has unveiled a brand new service – a new service to Google own productbase, that is, not to us lot. URL shortening. While services such as tiny.cc, ow.ly, and tinyurl.com are perfect for the job at hand, goo.gl is Google’s latest efforts to grab a portion of the 2.1 billion clicks that went through the bit.ly service in November this year.

Google’s approach isn’t to simply offer a new service to further their goliath brand. They explicitly state that they “may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.” This means that your information, although anonymous, will be tracked, monitored and potentially published and used for better targeting of their adverts or otherwise.

Even though we’ve seen similar services such as the tr.im closedown recently, it looks like URL shortening services are here to stay. And why not? They are perfect for posting long URLs on Twitter and Facebook, but it’s a service that is borne out of other leaders imposing limits on their service. Twitter for example with their 140 character limit on all tweets.

At the moment, Google’s URL shortening service can only be used for shortening Google’s own products and services and “not for broader consumer use.”

What are your thoughts on Google’s new venture? Are there enough URL shortening services? Do they simply disguise where you are linking to, shrouding your link destination in a cloud of fog? Should long URLs be there to let you know exactly what you’ll be seeing when you click on a link? Post your comments below.