I just discovered (but searching reveals that many others here on GovLoop already know this) that there is now an active beta site for feds to shorten their urls: http://go.usa.gov
Go.USA.gov lets government employees create short .gov URLs from official government domains, such as .gov, .mil, .si.edu, or .fed.us URLs.
We are currently beta testing Go.USA.gov. Go.USA.gov registration is limited to people with .mil, .gov, .fed.us, and .si.edu email addresses. If you are a government employee and would like to use it, please register for an account. If you are a government employee, but are unable to register, please contact us.
Go.USA.gov has shortened 6009 URLs that have been clicked 1111895 times.
Unfortunately, it’s not available to the many local govs that use the .org domain. Having a stable shortener, though, is great.
Nor states. But I’d rather it be this way then have it be open for people to abuse. It’ll be great for analytics and most importantly, building trust
I use go.usa.gov occasionally for utah.gov url’s. It’s a nice service. The challenge is that I can’t use it for everything so I bounce back and forth between it and bit.ly and sometimes forget go.usa.gov when I could have used it. I’d probably use it even more if it gave me the metrics that I get from bit.ly. I wish I could use the .edu for state universities also, but I can’t.
Anyone in the VA using this?
Our state agency website is so long, that I end up telling people just to google us. I’d love to be able to shorten it up somehow on some of our sites
I would love to see an API to allow people to track activity/popularity.