Twitter Hammers Nail in Coffin for Tr.im
The list of URL shorteners just got shorter.
According to a blog post by Nambu, the company is shutting its doors on URL shortening tool, Tr.im. After a number of attempts to sell the service, no companies in the Twitter space stepped forward to purchase and operate it in its existing form. Says the company, "There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening -- users won't pay for it -- and we just can't justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner."
In addition to a number of general URL shorteners such as bit.ly and TinyURL, Tr.im was also competing against site-specific services like StumbleUpon's Su.pr and music URL shortener TinySong.
The company's Twitter statistics (as with all URL shortening services) are used to determine and aggregate Twitter trends by Tweetmeme; however, as of today, according to the company these statistics "can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward." Tr.im links will continue to redirect until at least December 31, 2009.
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Really sad - they were a great shortener and it was a great service useful for more than just tweets... Hate to see them go. Would love to see someone try to put together an open source, distributed tr.im service (if it was the server cost was what was causing them to shut down and not remain just free).
I talked with the tr.im guys a while back when I built a Dashboard widget that leveraged their API. They seemed to be going about things the right way, so it's a shame to see them go. As a friend said on Twitter, when a URL shortening service dies, it takes a part of the web with it. Another "indie" alternative is http://hurl.ws ... Just talked with Hurl's creator and he says it'll be around for a long time.
So here's a business opportunity, built on the ashes of failed URL shortening services:
Create a service that takes all the tr.im URLs, un-shortens them to get the original URL, then re-shortens them with a service that's likely to survive like bit.ly or cli.gs, and updates all of your tweets.
Maybe some people would actually pay $5 for that...
I really enjoyed the service. Its a shame to see them go.
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