The Google URL shortener was originally launched back in December as a tool primarily for use by Google itself. Well, today Google announced in their blog that the tool has been launched and made available to everyone! You do not need a Google account to use goo.gl . That said, if you want to know the analytics and history of your shortened URL, you will need to log into Google account to hang onto that statistical data.

Google's URL shortening service, Goo.gl, has added new features and launched it's open service and companion site today for public use. When the feature first went into action in December of last year, it was not a stand-alone one. It was only accessible through the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. However, now is it openly available by visiting Goo.gl . New features added to Goo.gl include, breakdowns of link clickers, and QR codes for every link shortened.

William Ziff-Levine, Principal and Co-Founder of D&MC, kicked off AOLs Content, so what? session with a reminder about what consumers are really doing with their time online. According to two recent D&MC and Nielsen studies , 53% of consumers time is spent with content. The remaining 47% is spent communicating with others via email, IM and social networking. Ziff-Levine said consumers want content thats fresh, personal and contains compelling narratives.

The Microsoft Advertising adCenter API Sandbox environment will experience some downtime from Monday, October 4 to Tuesday, October 5 to implement updates for the adCenter Fall 2010 API Upgrade . While the version 7 Sandbox environment will not be available, the API Production environment will operate as usual and ads will continue to serve. If you have any questions, please visit the API Forum .

Charles Johnson leads the mobile team at Microsoft Advertising and they recently announced the Windows Phone 7 Advertising SDK and a solution for app developers and publishers . We got to chat after his presentation at our seminar on the Future of Digital Marketing at Advertising Week here in NYC. Do remember to follow us on Twitter and our Facebook Page and subscribe to the Microsoft Advertising Blog for all the latest news from Ad Week in New York City.

There was big news earlier today in the online video world, with comScore announcing that Facebook had passed Yahoo in terms of monthly unique visitors. Only YouTube/"Google sites" of course remains in first place, and this afternoon a YouTube product manager took a moment to discuss the effectiveness of the site's promotion tools. On the YouTube Blog ,

Google has introduced a new image format from the web, aimed at speeding up load times. It's called WebP. Here's a sample of the announcement : Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution.

by Mike Krumboltz There's an old saying in Hollywood: Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. The creators of " The Social Network ," the movie about the rise of Facebook, took that mantra to heart. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the movie fiction . The filmmakers don't disagree. The film has little concern for accuracy, and it doesn't really pretend to. Critics don't seem to mind, either. The film is earning raves. The movie,

HP named Léo Apotheker, formerly CEO of SAP , as its new CEO to replace the recently ousted Mark Hurd. Apotheker will also join HP's Board of Directors. "Léo is a strategic thinker with a passion for technology, wide-reaching global experience and proven operational discipline exactly what we were looking for in a CEO," said Robert Ryan, lead independent director of HP's Board. "After more than two decades in the industry,

Google has had its own URL shortener for some time. It just didn't make it available for general use. It was always attached to various Google products. That changes now, as Google has given it is own site at goo.gl . It's called simply, Google URL Shortener. "We dont intend to overload goo.gl with features, but we do want it to be the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web," says Google software engineer Muthu Muthusrinivasan.