Unfortunately, the hard realities of business have caught up with my preferred URL shortener tr.im. The operators, Nambu, feel they are unable to continue funding the service and have also been unable to find a buyer, so they have taken the decision to shut down the service.
A notice posted on the tr.im homepage reads:
tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.
Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. 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.
This is a sensible and understandable business decision on Nambu’s part, if a little inconvenient for me.
I had only been using the tr.im service via the Twitter Tools Wordpress plugin to publicise my blog posts on Twitter and gather click statistics from them, so the total loss of the service (should it come to that) would not be a disaster for me. Judging by the comments on this tr.im blog post though, others have been relying on the service far more than I.
tr.im’s demise highlights an important point about building on top services like these, and by extension other free services without a real sustainable business model, as pointed out by a commenter on an earlier post:
Single point of failure (if tinyurlFoo goes down, so do all the links) and bad for archiving (if tinyurlFoo ceases trading all historical links are lost).
For now, I’ve switched over to the bit.ly service, though I am considering setting up a URL shortening service on one of my own domains purely for personal use.
It would still a single point of failure of course. But at least, for the most part, I would control when it failed.
John Girvin is an experienced a software engineer and web developer based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He draws on over 14 years of hard won, real world experience of different projects, clients and working environments.
John is currently working with the Art Technology Group (ATG), developing J2EE based, market leading e-commerce technology.
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