Reposting from the official Google Blog:

In the world of URLs, bigger is not always better. In 2009, we helped shrink up long, unwieldy URLs by launching our public URL shortener, goo.gl. Today, we’re announcing a new URL shortcut that will only link to official Google products and services: g.co.

The shorter a URL, the easier it is to share and remember. The downside is, you often can’t tell what website you’re going to be redirected to. We’ll only use g.co to send you to webpages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts. That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.

There’s no need to fret about the fate of goo.gl; we like it as much as you do, and nothing is changing on that front. It will continue to be our public URL shortener that anybody can use to shorten URLs across the web.

We’d like to thank our friends at .CO Internet SAS who operate .co domain names for facilitating the acquisition of g.co, and keep your eyes open as we start rolling out g.co as our official URL shortcut for Google websites.

Posted by Gary Briggs, VP Consumer Marketing

So if its only for Google Products, then i’m guessing that this shorten all long google.com URL’s to shorter ones. I have a feeling that G.CO could also be the official Short URL for Google+ posts too, which is a most awaited feature for all G+ users. All we’ve to do is wait and watch

Last week Google introduced its own short URL Goo.gl and now YouTube follows and has its own short URL – YOUTU.BE too. YouTube has used a Belgian domain, Youtu.be. These short URL’s are for YouTube videos and be used in conjunction with the Auto Share function and also all videos on the website through these short URL’s reachable. You cannot use short URL’s for other websites as possible with the Google.

In a blog post announcing the new feature, YouTube writes that the short URL will be used exclusively for YouTube videos (which mean it isn’t as useful to spammers for misdirection). The post also notes that because all youtu.be shortlinks include the YouTube video ID, developers can use that information to surface thumbnails and track how a video is spreading.

Unfortunately, embedding a video ID has a downside: they’re relatively long. Whereas your typical bit.ly link weighs in at around 20 characters, a youtu.be link comes out to 27 characters, primarily because YouTube IDs are a beefy 11 characters long. That may not sound like much, but those extra 7 characters represent 5% of your maximum tweet length. Hopefully the features that video IDs enable for developers will outweigh that cost.

Any videos shared through YouTube’s autosharing features to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader will take advantage of the new short URLs automatically.

Techcrunch also reported that the youtube URL’s are Still Pretty Long . And Mashable says Youtube needs its own Short URL Coz they just need one….

You can also create the link yourself in this format:

To use youtu.be manually, simply take a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs and replace the “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=” with “http://youtu.be/” to get: http://youtu.be/FdeioVndUhs Plug that shorter URL into the browser and you’ll see it redirects to that video.

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:

• Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
• Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
• Speed – fast resolution of short URLs

Google says:

Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

You can find the new shortening service being implemented in the Google Toolbar and In Feedburner for now.

Google now automatically uses shortened links in the mobile version of Gmail. Longer links are now automatically reduced and converted to readable links, which Google called Smart Links. Thus, for example, a link to Google Maps into a link with the actual address as under the permalink in the screenshot. The link still takes you to the same page, however this is a lot shorter, useful on a mobile phone and the information is immediately visible.

Here’s a list of links Google currently support:

• Google Maps address queries
• Google Maps directional queries (with one destination)
• Google Sites webpages
• YouTube videos

In the future, more services could be added; such as Google Docs.