URL shortener Trim gets cut off
With so many URL shortening services out there, this was bound to happen to at least one of them: Trim is shutting down. According to a blog post by parent company Nambu Networks, it was an expensive and fruitless effort.
"We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential," the post read.
Those expenses may have been particularly encumbering recently, when the service, found at Tr.im, was hit by a denial-of-service attack last week that knocked it offline.
The blog post was tinged with more than a hint of bitterness. Twitter, the service that led to the explosion of URL shorteners as Web users needed to truncate lengthy addresses to fit into a 140-character space, has shown a clear preference for Trim rival Bitly. Twitter uses Bitly as its default URL shortener, and it's even been rumored that Twitter may acquire it altogether.
"Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double down and develop Tr.im further," the post read. "What is the point? With Bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, Tr.im will lose over (in) the long run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future."
What the company hasn't said: what will happen to existing Trim URLs? It's likely that Nambu Networks hasn't yet decided. If Trim is completely closed, that would mean that those shortened URLs would turn into broken links. It'd be possible to close it to new entries but keep existing ones, except that wouldn't solve the financial problem.
One commenter on the Trim blog post suggested that perhaps the service could live on in the form of an open-source project. But for now, its fate remains up in the air.
Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. E-mail Caroline. 
Trim is shutting down because it's not competing with Bitly. It's running at a loss. Why would Bitly want to dilute any profitability it might have with a loss, and not even a loss leader, more like a loss loser.
There are dozens of URL shortening sites out there. We created our own, just so that we would not be subjected to this kind of shutdown issue. The technology is trivial, just using basic features of HTTP. So, it's no wonder that there are so many. The big question is really this: how in the world can anybody honestly expect to make money on a URL shortening service? We didn't set out to make money on the service we created and I would question any such site that has plans to make money.
As Trim stated on its site, "There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening -- users won't pay for it -- and we just can't justify further development..."
These URL shortening services have been around for a decade and their original purpose was largely to give people running websites on free web hosts like the soon to be defunct Geocities a more memorable URL. After a lot of the free hosts got rid of the convoluted neighborhood URLs and just gave everyone a subdomain the appeal to them went down dramatically. Between domains becoming cheap thanks to competition($10-15 as opposed to $35) and paid hosting with enough bandwidth to satisfy most people going for <$5/month almost anyone who wants a their own domain can easily have one.
The only purpose that these services still exist imho is to simply hide the final target of this short URL. These short URLs are rarely memorable and cutting and pasting a long URL isn't that complicated. It is a great way to spam social news sites with the same story because the site doesn't follow the redirect to discover that the link posted is a dupe.
For most of the rest of us who aren't trying to spam our favorite social news site or otherwise deceive somebody these services are a solution in search of a problem.
You obviously don't use Twitter. The purpose for url shorteners is to keep links from taking up all of (or even more than) the 140 character limit that Twitter has for tweets.
almost close enough for a donnie darko reference...
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.
i use tinyurl
Long live the GPL and Open Source!
http://urlshort.sourceforge.net
Seriously though, Twitter needs to cut off the character limit at 200, very annoying.
I have a better idea: how about they take that money and use it to generate a profitable business model. While they're at it, maybe they can solve the problem of having these URL shortening services a necessity in the first place.
1: The service is owned by the company itself
2: The service tries the Digg / StumbleUpon toolbar model where they could potentially display unobtrusive ads/services
If they were smart enough or cared enough, they would not count the length of URLs as part of the 140 characters or they would add another field to attach URLs to a message.
And as far as venture capital money goes... The more these unprofitable trendy services take and take, the less VCs will be willing to fund new and truly innovative projects. And when this happens, we--the users--are the ones who lose out.
- by davehong August 10, 2009 5:56 AM PDT
- Wow, I've never even SEEN a tr.im URL before.
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