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Tr.im Bites The Dust, Blames Twitter

By Michele Masterson, CRN August 10, 2009
Tweeters are kissing tr.im goodbye. The popular URL shortening service is shutting down due to a lack of funding, said owner Nambu Network Monday.

"Regretfully, we here at Nambu have decided to shut down tr.im, the first step in shutting down all of our products and services within that brand," the company said in its blog. "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 a lot of redirects and URL creations per day, and this required significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate."

By shortening long URL addresses, tr.im helps Twitter users get around the social networking service's 140-character limit to link their tweets.

Similar services include bit.ly, tinyarro.ws and tinyURL. Another URL shortening service, is.gd, sums up the technology by its tagline "Compress that address!" In addition, some URL shortening services also include services such as browser plug-ins.

In its blog, tr.im said it was "surprised to learn" that no one wanted to run the service after Nambu said it could no longer afford to do so. "We quietly contacted a number of people within the Twitter development world, and nobody wanted it in exchange for 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."

The tr.im folks also blame Twitter for pointing tweets to rival service bit.ly.

"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 long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future," the blog said.

Tr.im discontinued its service Sunday and said that tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected and that all tr.im links will continue to redirect until at least December 31.

As the company's blog post said, tr.im, RIP.


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