If you’ve adopted Google+ into your Social Media family, then you may/probably/might want to get yourself a shorter, cleaner URL than the unmemorable one that you are automatically assigned.
Well, now you can.
It’s actually a URL redirect from a 3rd party site but given Google+ doesn’t yet have an official vanity URL service like Facebook, this will have to do for now.
Simply visit gplus.to, enter your chosen nickname, your current Google+ ID and you’ll be presented with your new vanity loaded URL redirect.
I went from:
https://plus.google.com/110043683773408802295/
to
now I’ve done that, I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with it, but for those that like their vanity filled, easy to remember URLs then this service will be useful till Google+ pull their fingers out.
Not to be a downer, but doesn’t this increase one’s exposure to being tracked by 3rd parties. They’re (the proverbial “they”) are mining the social graph to the point of 1984. Oh well…. (Orwell….).
see also / food for thought:
http://www.cirrusabs.com/blog/is-google-url-shortener-gplus-to-keeping-your-link-juice/
(yes, I see this guy’s selling reputation mgmt …. )
http://knowem.com/blog/2011/07/05/warning-new-gplus-to-site-not-affiliated-with-google/
http://gplusinsider.com/google-vanity-url-shortener-gets-more-prominent/
“…Vanity URLs aren’t offer by Google since it’ll be much simpler for spammers to find out the Gmail addresses of countless Google+ users online…”
Hi Leebert,
Am not too concerned about the link juice aspect – have long since stopped obsessing about such things, and if those guys want to keep it for providing a service that Google have not done so yet (i.e. quick and tidy URLs to G+ profiles) then they can have it, no problem with that – I didn’t sign up with G+ on the hope I could get followed links from their domain to any of my web properties (fwiw I don’t even use gplusto, just threw the blog post out there for anyone who had such a requirement).
I never really considered any security aspects – having read that post and the comments from the developer, my mind is at ease now anyway – but does give me something to think about in future
cheers for the post