tr.im shuts up shop
p2pnet news view P2P:- Nambu says it’s shutting down tr.im as the, “first step in shutting down all of our products and services within that brand”.
tr.im is, “in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately,” says the site, going on:
“However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected. We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.
“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. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep. We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.
Now, “tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough,” says the closing down announcement »»»
We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential. tr.im pushes (as I write this) a lot of redirects and URL creations per day, and this required significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate.
tr.im has thousands and thousands of users, creating tens of thousands of URLs per day. But, we were a little surprised to learn, *no one* wanted to take it over. We quietly contacted a number of people within the Twitter development world, and nobody wanted it in exchange a token amount of money. No one perceived any value in it, or they wanted to operate a shortener under a differently branded domain name.
And, users will not pay for URL shortening, and why should they?
And, the data that tr.im generates â the hottest links that people are sharing right now â is all well and good, but everyone has this data. tr.im gets hit by countless bots every day farming this data to create and operate websites such as tweetmeme.com. So, *everyone* has this data, meaning it is basically worthless *by itself* to base a business on (as bit.ly and others are attempting to do) at least in our humble opinions.
And finally, Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further. What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future.
So, in summary, there is simply no point in continuing to operate or work on tr.im, and we are moving on to greener pastures. We appreciate all the support and kind words about tr.im we received over the past 12 months, but change is ultimately good, and bit.ly can more than accommodate your URL shortening needs.
With that last sentence in mind, “Bit.ly (bit.ly), the default URL shortener on Twitter (Twitter), wants to save dying URL shorteners,” says Mashable.
There were “deeply worrying implications for URL shorteners,” it’d said because, “when these services go away, tens of thousands of links on the web simply stop working. Some sites will lose hundreds of inbound links, and the traffic that comes with them.”
But, “About 4 months ago, bit.ly investor Betaworks began a project called 301works, an archive of URL mappings similar to the Way Back Machine for web pages. None of the other URL shorteners expressed interest at the time (not surprising, since Bit.ly is their biggest competitor).”
In a mail to Mashable , “Betaworks tells us that they`ve reached out to Tr.im`s founder and ‘offered to host his URL mappings starting tomorrow’,” says the story, adding:
“Whether Tr.im takes them up on the offer is another matter, since the Tr.im closure announcement reads: ‘ … we just can`t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner’
Another option for Bit.ly might simply be to buy Tr.im for a small amount: the move would reassure critics who say that all URL shorteners are not to be trusted because they could close down at any time.
Stytnd.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
shutting down tr.im – tr.im R.I.P., August 9, 2009
Mashable – Bit.ly Swoops in to Save Tr.im, August 10, 2009
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August 10th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
I thought about what would happen to all these links when I saw tinyurl appearing a long time ago.
August 10th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
URL shorteners were a great invention, very practical in all senses.
but aren’t we “killing the web”? What happens when a provider closes? Will they migrate the links to other future providers? Eventually all links will be dead! Is it correct to centralize lot’s of meta-links in one place? What about the dangers of centralizing a service?
But maybe that’s the transient nature of the web, we can’t keep the links working forever.
August 10th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
btw, an interesting article on URL shorteners is
“Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002″
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001276.html