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Since they will be continuing to honor existing redirects, do they gain anything by disallowing new redirects? If it is engineering effort they want to save, th

• niftich 9y ago
  Continuing to honor existing redirects is a relatively simple gesture of goodwill -- it's absolutely what customers expect, it's good for the web, and doesn't need a lot of ongoing effort. Rather, it looks like they're driving people to a different product intended for a different set of usecases [1]. They want to get out of the generic, commodity web URL shortener business, and drive more of their customers towards more purposeful destination forwarding. [1] https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/use-cases/ https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/use-cases/
  • duskwuff 9y ago
    Crucially, the new product is unlikely to be available through a web interface (at least, without an account), so Google no longer has to deal with their link shortener being used for spam and fraud.
    • manquer 9y ago
      Spammers would not be dettered by the need to use an API. Besides anyone could build a frontend for accessing the API
• pgeorgi 9y ago
  It's probably maintenance effort they want to save. Once the service is locked and statistics are off (ie mid-2019) the entire site could be replaced with an exported set of static files.
• johan_larson 9y ago
  I'm a bit surprised they are planning to continue to support existing short urls indefinitely. Presumably that will go away at some point. Ain't nothing free.