Tr.im to Go Open Source, Community Owned
Updated at 12:45 PM PST with a response from Bit.ly
After weeks of controversy concerning a possible closure of the service, URL shortener Tr.im just announced that it's open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available from now on, in real time. Founder Eric Woodward will spin the project out from his core company Nambu, will cover operational costs personally and will work with anyone who wants to help make Tr.im a community-owned alternative to what Woodward says is a data-hoarding monopoly in Bit.ly and Twitter.
Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. The new Tr.im may be the most exciting thing to happen in URL shortening since now market leader Bit.ly itself launched.
Woodward says that the Tr.im code will be cleaned up and available for hacking no later than September 15th, that the code will be licensed under an MIT Open Source license, real time click data will be made available in anonymous aggregate via service provider Gnip and a foundation or nonprofit owner to control the domain name is still being sought.
URL shortening is of course important primarily because of Twitter, where links have to be shortened in order to save characters against the limit of 140 per message. This May Twitter chose to make Bit.ly its default URL shortener, replacing TinyURL. Bit.ly's marketshare in the URL shortening world became a near instant monopoly.
This is important because these URL shorteners have all kinds of data about which links on Twitter and elsewhere are getting the most click-throughs. Bit.ly is interesting because they've been building all kinds of value ads on top of that data - real time analytics, semantic analysis of the linked-to pages and more. Many people believe that Bit.ly could become one of the hottest sources of news discovery on the web, challenging now slow-looking sites like Digg.
Woodward argues that the relationship between Twitter and Bit.ly has made the URL shortening business pointless for everyone else. It was taking up a lot of his time, causing him headaches and he was feeling pressure to dedicate more time to his company's core product, the Nambu desktop client.
Last month Woodward announced he would be closing Tr.im down and a substantial number of people freaked out. The biggest concern was that all the short links that had been created would now be broken. Some developers complained that they had invested time into building services that utilized Tr.im's analytics. In response to the uproar, Woodward changed his mind. He said he'd keep the service up for some period of time, he tried to find a seller, but today he's announcing a permanent change to the nature of the product.
Woodward argues that Bit.ly and Twitter will not expose raw aggregate clickthrough data to just anyone to develop on top of. That's what the new community-owned Tr.im is going to do. Working with activity data hub provider Gnip, Tr.im will make aggregate anonymized data available in real time, for free. That means that any random developer can build something exciting on top of that stream of data, not just the selected partners of Twitter and Bit.ly.
Woodward says that if the community can take Tr.im to 5 or 10% marketshare, then it should have a good sample of the data Bit.ly is seeing in the rest of the market. Opening that data to developers in real time would then become more valuable than anything Tr.im can offer in aggregate today.
Update: We spoke with Bit.ly's John Borthwick and this is what he had to say: "I think this is great, it means there will be a future for tr.im and having more services out there is a really good thing. [Tr.im's Eric Woodward] is short on the facts though and the facts are if you look at the clicks and encodes on bit.ly in a day, 15 million yesterday for example, 60% of them are from Twitter, less than 10% come from twitter.com. It's about product iteration and adding features. [That's why Bit.ly is so popular, Borthwick argues.] Eric made a choice and bit.ly has made a different choice." Borthwick also emphasized that Bit.ly has to invest substantial resources into scaling, something that the Tr.im community will need to take very seriously if it is to grow.
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There are already a few open source (and OSSD-compliant) link shorteners available like http://ur1.ca but it's great to hear that another service is going the open way!
Check out and promote other OSSD-compliant services on their wiki: http://wiki.okfn.org/openservices
Nice Play!
IMHO http://tweak.tk produces best short URLS.
Not open source but better than bit.ly/tr.im and the rest.
Tr.im To Go Open Source, Community Owned http://bit.ly/cb3cm !!! [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/3366266018]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 17, 2009 12:01 PM
Very visionary of Eric, it's important that a community gathers to support it. Also glad to see Gnip get behind it! :-)
I will release the source of my 40-Twits app, the program that powers my Top 40 list and that of Jay Rosen and Nieman Labs.
http://dave.40twits.com/
http://jay.40twits.com/
http://nieman.40twits.com/
The app builds on the tr.im API.
Cool! We're looking for a URL shortener to use for Grabbit, and this is going to make things SO much easier. Thanks, Eric!!!
FYI: for the most flaky URL shortening, try Crisco ;-)
This is great news. I hope it takes off. Tr.im works great, and it's the only service that had an easy to use Firefox extension that gave you one-click links copied to clipboard, direct to your Tr.im profile.
Also Tr.im is one of the best names you could have for a short URL service. Blows away any of the others out there, including bit.ly
What programming language is tr.im written in?
Thought he said the problem was the operational costs.
That's not going to go away.
He's OK with funding a revenueless tr.im now?
nice news, and now frigg.md
Why are major tech blogs so blind and reluctant to write about the twitter / betaworks relationship ?
Samir, we've written about that over and over again. Almost mentioned it here again but just didn't.
Brilliant to see, there are so many applications for a data feed like this for trend analysis as well as mashing with other localised data.
It's going to be interesting to watch the community progress.
I'll be helping however I can.
@Marshall all right. You do agree that there is at least *some* degree of truth in what trim depict then, and that major tech blogs seem reluctant to *really* report on the twitter / betaworks reltionship ?
I mean, look at TC and Mashable's coverage on the subject...
Sure, trim's behaviour has been strange in the past 8 days, but I think they express what 90% of twitter third party apps think. The remaining 10% being either funded by betaworks, or having their CEO jogging with the twitter api team every week (very helpful to be featured in twitter's "featured definitions" ^^)
Samir, I like the bit.ly folks a lot but I am apt to agree with Tr.im and your comments, yes.
Well, as I look at at twitter right now not one of the companies in the "featured definitions" section (assuming you mean the one on the twitter.com page is associated with bitly or betaworks - indeed some of their competitors are? Samir/Marshall - so what are you referring to then?
Jeff, Bit.ly is the best example of this - common investors. Tipjoy might be another one, it is one of the very few 3rd party developer projects the twitter staff follows on twitter and it's a betaworks project. It used to be one of the definitions a lot. Trazzler is another of the definitions and though it's not disclosed, it's a company Ev and Biz have invested in and advise. Other highlighted "definitions" include WeFollow, a Kevin Rose company, and Seesmic, founded by valley celeb Loic Le Meur. Not sure what a little outsider can do.
Good bits, and glad they're going open / no loss of links.
Found via AddToAny. Thanks,
John
Tipjoy in the twitter gadget was completely editorial. The shared investors is more about knowing the right people to get a bit of attention. That's how business works, and why people stress that networking is important.
Also, that stat about twitter employees following @tipjoy was from a misled article that didn't actually do its homework. Following @tipjoy is automatic on tipjoy signup. The account rarely updates for this reason (and thus doesn't lose many followers upset about the auto-follow). The auto-follow is to enable two way DMs. Other services like TwitPic or Tweetdeck are far more popular, but don't do auto-follow on signup (yet).
Sorry, but transfering everything into open source space will not solve the money problem, even if Eric puts in his own money to cover the difference between community donations and the reality!
Let the link rot start!
http://bit.ly/link-rot
http://apu.sh/linkrot
http://tinyurl.com/linkrot
http://cl.gs/JNTY71
http://u.nu/5vys
...
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Margaret
http://grantfoundation.net
Hey there are so many url shorteners on web, its difficult to choose, i use www.Aafter.com its very easy to use it for url shortening.
You can build one with Drupal ;)
http://drupal.org/project/shorturl
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After this I will read all your posts thankful.