Beefing up goo.gl with new features

Since we launched our URL shortener goo.gl last September, we’ve been lucky enough to build a thriving and growing community of passionate users who aren’t shy about letting us know when something could be better. We appreciate the feedback, and today we’ve completed a series of feature rollouts aimed at addressing your most common requests.

The Top 25 URL Shorteners: Compared!

Mirror, mirror on the wall: Who's the best URL shortener of them all?
We suppose that depends on what you mean by "best."
WatchMouse has thrown up a new blog post in which the website performance monitoring company compares a number of the top URL shortening services across a few different metrics: uptime, speed, and popularity. Google's goo.gl takes top honors as the one of the fastest and most consistent URL shorteners around, but that's done little to boost the service's presence compared to its peers.

Which URL Shortener Should You Use?

All URL shorteners are far from equal. That’s what new data from online performance monitoring service WatchMouse finds.

A Look At The Uptime Of 50 Popular APIs

APIs are like websites: they are available most of the time, but unfortunately not all the time.
Website and application performance monitoring startup WatchMouse monitored the uptime of 50 of the most popular APIs (as ranked by ProgrammableWeb) for a month to see which are the most reliable – and which ones are rather flaky.

API downtime: Who’s asleep at the wheel?

Many popular applications use the application programming interfaces (APIs) of other services, from your favorite Twitter client to Facebook apps. So downtime on the most popular APIs has a serious knock-on effect on other services and (up)time is money.

API downtime: Who’s asleep at the wheel?

Performance monitoring company, WatchMouse, just published a study on the downtimes of the 50 most popular APIs including Google Maps, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Wikipedia.

Groupon set to raise nearly $1B

Groupon, the fast-growing Chicago startup that dominates the daily-deal category, has filed revised articles of incorporation that give it the right to issue $950 million in shares, according to VC Experts, a site that analyzes corporate filings. And CEO Andrew Mason just posted a confirmation on Twitter that the company is in the midst of raising a new round of financing.

Why Facebook disappeared

Facebook blipped earlier this afternoon, kicking off the collective Internet freakout that traditionally accompanies such calamities.

Watchmouse monitort sites van Wikipedia, Firefox en Twitter

Stan van de Burgt en Mark Pors hebben samen Watchmouse opgezet, een bedrijf waarbij klanten hun eigen site kunnen monitoren. Zij zijn begonnen zonder vreemd kapitaal maar hebben nu klanten als Wikipedia en Firefox.

Outage Hits Amazon European Sites

The Twitterverse was, well, all a twitter late Sunday night over speculation that the notorious Anonymous group of internet hackers was behind the mysterious temporary outage of some European Amazon sites late on Sunday night.

All European Amazon sites taken offline in mystery outage

Amazon’s entire European operation went down tonight for about 45 minutes tonight, but the sites are now back up again. Twitter has been awash speculation that sites the sites were taken out by the Anonymous group campaigning on behalf of Wikileaks. But so far Amazon has issued no comment. Data from Watchmouse confirmed the outage.

Cyber Monday Sales Up 19.4 Percent, Report Says

Shoppers did not hesitate to do a little online shopping this Cyber Monday. Online sales yesterday were up 19.4 percent compared to 2009, with consumers spending an average of about $195 compared to $180 last year, according to data from Coremetrics.

Today in Tech

Web site WatchMouse tracked the top 100 e-tailers in the month leading up to Black Friday and found that 27 of them had 100% uptime and 15 experienced 99.99% uptime.

American Eagle, JC Penney Sites Suffer Holiday Outages

The Web sites of American Eagle and JC Penney suffered the worst outages of the holiday season including Black Friday, with major sites such as Amazon.com succeeding perfectly, according to a site uptime survey.

As Holiday Shoppers Flock To The Web, WatchMouse Tracks Performance Of E-Retailers

Website monitoring startup WatchMouse is now monitoring the top 100 retail websites for availability around the holiday shopping season. The starup tested retail sites including Apple, Amazon, BestBuy, Borders, Overstock, Walmart and Zappos, for availability and performance during the month leading up to and including Thanksgiving Day, November 25 and Black Friday, November 26.

How the New Goo.gl Compares to Other URL Shorteners

Google's URL shortener Goo.gl has launched its open service and companion website to the public this afternoon. The service looks a whole lot like upstart innovator Bit.ly.

Darum war Facebook nicht erreichbar

Facebook, das mit 500 Millionen Mitgliedern größte soziale Netzwerk im Internet, war am Donnerstagabend für zweieinhalb Stunden nicht erreichbar. Schon der zweite Facebook-Ausfall in zwei Tagen. Was ist da los?

Facebook – "Schlimmster Ausfall seit vier Jahren"

Das größte soziale Netzwerk der Welt war für viele Stunden nicht erreichbar. Die Ausfälle deuten auf Probleme mit der Infrastruktur hin.

The 2010 Bully Award winners are… Germany and the UK top the list

The winners of the 2010 Bully Award – all thirty of them – were announced last night at the White Bull Summit 2010 in Barcelona, honouring the leading European technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) companies. Germany and the UK topped the list of winners each with five companies represented, followed closely by The Netherlands with four.

A Fail Whale For the Rest of Us: Social.DownorNot.com

Netherlands-based website monitoring company WatchMouse has created a public website dedicated to measuring performance at social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us, Digg, Xanga and Flickr.

Flickr and Orkut lead the social media uptime league

Want to know how reliable your favourite social media site is? A newly-launched service will tell you just that.

Social.Downornot.com from Watchmouse measures the uptime of a range of social sites and offers their current status along with an overview of their performance over the past week. Each of the 20 sites covered by the service is regularly checked, and if the result is wrong or is received after eight seconds, it is noted as an error and unavailable.

Uptime status questions for Public APIs? API Status has your answers

API Status is a free service provided by WatchMouse, a company which ”tests the behaviour and availability of websites, services and applications utilizing an infrastructure that includes over 50 worldwide remote monitoring stations and a global network of checkpoints in 26 countries.”

How the Twitter API is really doing

Want to see how the Twitter API is performing? Just go to the Public Website Health Status page. Here’s how these pages work:

A WatchMouse Public Status Page enables your organization to display information about the availability and performance of your critical services. You can post announcements, annotate current issues, and optionally set up a special host name (CNAME) so people can access the status page using your domain name, e.g. status.yourdomain.com. It is an easy control channel through which you can transparently inform visitors about the status of your sites and web services.

WatchMouse launches GeoBrand, PPC brand abuse monitoring tool

WatchMouse, the website performance monitoring company, has launched its new GeoBrand service today. It’s designed to detect "brand abuse" in search-based keyword advertising and follows the recent European Court ruling on the LVMH vs Google case which places the onus on the brands themselves to monitor for trademark infringements.

Geo-Brand.com - Monitor Your Brand At All Times

Presented by WatchMouse, GeoBrand is an emerging service that lets the user monitor and identify any case of online brand abuse that might occur.

Twitter's Roadmap Includes Real-Time Streams

Twitter's roadmap will include locations, user streams, and annotations, Ryan Sarver, head of Twitter's platform development, said Thursday at the Chirp conference here.

The company did not announce a formal roadmap, choosing instead to disclose a few additions that the company will be building in the next few months. One of the first was the addition of "places," a more fine-grained version of location that was announced earlier by Evan Williams, Twitter's chief executive.

Chirp: Twitter To Add Places, User Streams

Twitter's roadmap will include locations, user streams, and annotations, Ryan Sarver, head of Twitter's platform development, said Thursday at the Chirp conference here.

Live From Chirp: Twitter’s Platform Roadmap

Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s Director of Platform, has just taken the stage at Chirp, where he’s giving third party developers an outline of what they can expect in the future from Twitter’s all-important developer platform.

Twitter Launches Places, Annotations, User Streams for Developers

Twitter will soon give developers access to streams of user activity on its system, and allow them to create their own annotations to send along with tweets, Twitter’s director of platform, Ryan Sarver, said at the company’s Chirp conference in San Francisco today.

You can find video of Sarver’s presentation at Justin.tv

Many URL Shorteners Are Slow and Unreliable

Dutch web monitoring company WatchMouse has done a thorough analysis of uptime and performance of 14 major URL shortening services, with quite disheartening results.

All URL Shorteners Are Not Equal; Pick a Speedy and Reliable One

URL shorteners are great for minimizing URLs in a Twitter message or keeping links clean in an email, but as convenient as they are they do introduce an extra point of failure. WatchMouse, a monitoring organization, highlights the best.

Report: URL shorteners suck, Google's sucks the least

Download Squad readers haven't been shy about voicing their general distaste for the bazillion different short URL services out there. As if you needed another reason, a new report shows -- in USA Today style graphical goodness -- just how much they suck.

URL Shorteners Slow Down The Web – Especially Facebook's FB.me

It's hard to imagine a Web sans URL shortening services nowadays but you can rest assured that they're here to stay – for better or worse. Question is: how do the likes of bit.ly, TinyURL and Goo.gl score in terms of speed and availability?

URL shorterners slow things down

According to Watchmouse, URL shorteners actually slow down web browsing.

Counterproductive this may be, but Watchmouse says it is the norm on websites, and it claims that Facebook, which we already think sucks too much time out of most people's lives anyway, is the worst offender.

URL shorteners slow down the web, study says

URL shortening is among the convenient things that have silently changed our browsing habits. Most people click shortened links without even thinking, although such URLs can misdirect us and even lead to malware sites. And now a new study has confirmed what some of us have been suspecting all along, that URL shorteners slow down the web. When you think of it, such a notion makes a lot of sense.

Why short links can take a long time to get you around the web

Goo.gl good, fb.me bad: a study finds who's quick off the mark in the link-shortening world

URL Shorteners Can Lengthen Load Times

When there are only 140 characters, a link can be a major impediment to microblogging aspirations. URL shorteners can free up space, making services like bit.ly and ow.ly indispensable to some. Media companies are even launching personalized shorteners -- including The New York Times and NPR. Two recent studies, however, investigate the speed and reliability of these services and find that they can result in tradeoffs for that extra blogging space.

URL Shorteners Slow Down The Web - Especially Facebook's FB.me

It's hard to imagine a Web sans URL shortening services nowadays but you can rest assured that they're here to stay - for better or worse. Question is: how do the likes of bit.ly, TinyURL and Goo.gl score in terms of speed and availability?

Google App Engine Sputters

We've been getting a number of tips about the Google App Engine API being down hard, causing a good number of third-party services who depend on it to fail or be downright inaccessible. A quick check on API-status, which tracks that sort of thing, confirmed the service disruption.

Google App Engine Sputters

We've been getting a number of tips about the Google App Engine API being down hard, causing a good number of third-party services who depend on it to fail or be downright inaccessible. A quick check on API-status, which tracks that sort of thing, confirmed the service disruption.

Is the App Broken, Or the API? Find Out With API-status

Though we have previously warned startups to tread carefully when building their businesses on third party APIs, there are still plenty of successful businesses that rely on them for their day-to-day operation.

Hey Look, It's The Twitter Fail Whale!

Just yesterday I wrote about a new service called API-Status.com that monitors the availability of 26 popular APIs, and today it’s already proven useful for me. The Twitter API is down, causing thousands of third-party apps and services to malfunction.

WatchMouse Monitors 26 Popular APIs So You Don’t Have To

Website monitoring startup WatchMouse is launching a new service dubbed API-status.com today, a website that displays realtime availability and performance of popular, public APIs.

The lists of monitored APIs consists of 26 of the most heavily trafficked Web services, including Google Search, Google Maps, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, SalesForce, YouTube, Amazon, eBay and others.

WatchMouse: Tracking The Health Of Web Services

As backend APIs (application programming interfaces) power more of our interactions online – as the foundation for applications, widgets and other platforms – it becomes increasingly important to monitor the status of their uptime.

WatchMouse Monitors 26 Popular APIs So You Don't Have To

Website monitoring startup WatchMouse is launching a new service dubbed API-status.com today, a website that displays realtime availability and performance of popular, public APIs.

Test: Google DNS is snel maar onbetrouwbaar

Vorige week verbaasde Google vriend en vijand door een eigen DNS-cache te presenteren. Hoe doet Google Public DNS het vergeleken met de rest?

De Utrechtse website monitoring dienst WatchMouse nam de proef op de som en vergeleek vier publieke DNS-diensten: DNSAdvantage, DNSResolvers, Google Public DNS en OpenDNS. Iedere dienst kreeg verspreid over zes dagen 18.000 queries voor de kiezen vanuit 42 locaties over de hele wereld.

WatchMouse: "Nederlandse webwinkels goed bereikbaar".

WatchMouse publiceert vandaag voor het zesde jaar op rij de onderzoeksresultaten naar de bereikbaarheid van Nederlandse webwinkels. Uit het onderzoek blijkt, dat steeds meer Nederlandse webwinkels beschikken over goed bereikbare websites. Van de 89 webwinkels die in het onderzoek zijn opgenomen halen maar liefst 41 sites een score van 99,9% en hoger, en 27 daarvan de maximale score van 100%. Negen van de sites in het onderzoek presteren echter slecht, waaronder bekende namen als Vodafone (92,85%), Mediamarkt (94,36%), Bart Smit (96,23%) en Dell.nl (98,48%).

Taskforce maakt winnaars IPv6-awards bekend

Taskforce IPv6 heeft de winnaars van de IPv6-awards bekendgemaakt. Monitordienst WatchMouse, de Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (NPO), Hogeschool Utrecht en Universiteit van Amsterdam, Arnout Veenman, Jasper Wonnink en internetserviceprovider BIT wonnen elk een IPv6-award. Er zijn zes verschillende categorieën.

Grote sites als Albert.nl en Dell.nl lang onbereikbaar

De digitale winkels van Albert Heijn en Dell scoren waren vorige maand meer dan een volledige werkdag niet bereikbaar. Zij behoren tot een groep met in totaal tien procent van de grootste webwinkels die uren en soms dagen off line zijn.