August 2009 Archives

Happy News: Tr.im Lives!

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O happy day, here at itdied.com: The tr.im URL shortener service has opted to stay alive instead of shutdown. Shortcut services have a hard time making money because their job is to stay out of the way. After a flood of "how can we help" messages from users, tr.im's parent firm, Nambu Network, is moving the service into a community-operated mode, details to follow. The company will transfer the domain name, databases, and software, and hopes that it can be run via donations and other means. The CEO of Nambu will pay all expenses out of his pocket until funding can be worked out. ItLives!

Tr.im Trimmed

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The tr.im URL shortening service has shortened its lifespan: The service will no guarantee redirects for URLs starting 31-Dec-2009, and has disclaimed the reliability of its statistics from this point on.

Tr.im, like other URL shorteners, generates a short unique code that someone can use in place of a full URL. Full URLs often have long sets of words in them for search engine optimization and human readability. These long URLs fall afoul of social media sites which either break these strings funny or, like Twitter, limit text.

It's hard to get money out of URL shortening because there are so many services, and the service performed is non-unique. Many firms have tried to add value to shortening by providing extras, like future redirection (if the destination URL has changed), statistics, and other efforts. I don't know of any that have stuck because it's a marginal utility function.

On the flip side, URL shorteners must be reliable, safe, and fast. The ones that don't meet those criteria wind up being quickly abandoned.

Twitter accelerated the usage of URL shorteners without any commensurate method for those firms to accelerate revenue or revenue potential. Tr.im cried uncle, and is taking its ball and bat elsewhere.

About this Site

Keeping track of hosted services as they lay dying. Edited by Glenn Fleishman. Send tips or news to glenn@glennf.com.

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This page is an archive of entries from August 2009 listed from newest to oldest.

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