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.
One of the myriad URL-shortening services out there, found at Tr.im, suffered an outage for some time Wednesday, rendering many links unable to redirect.
The service--which is owned by a start-up called the Nambu Network--believes hackers are to blame. "From this end it appeared we suffered a denial of service attack, and we took appropriate action to get the website back to full service," a Trim representative said to CNET News in an e-mail.
There's another, less likely possible culprit: Airline JetBlue hit one million Twitter followers on Wednesday, and announced a one day-only commemorative deal that would shave 20 percent off the cost of any flights booked through a promotional link. It used Trim as the URL shortener for the link in question, and acknowledged in its "JetBlue Cheeps" Twitter-deals account that heavy volume from the sale may have unexpectedly caused the outage.
Whether or not it was the JetBlue promotion that crippled Trim, there's a bigger-picture problem here: URL shorteners like TinyURL, Bitly, Owly, Isgd, and related offerings from Digg and StumbleUpon, are a huge deal when we've all grown accustomed to fitting stuff into 140-character fields. Some, like Bitly (which Twitter uses as its automatic link shortener and which has been talked up as a possible acquisition for the microblogging company) and Trim, offer some tracking data and analytics surrounding the links plugged into their systems.
But when one crashes, so do all the links associated with it. Or what happens if a URL shortener goes out of business altogether? There would be a whole lot of lost, broken links out there. Some very small URLs could have a very big impact on the organization of the Web.
This post was updated at 1:13 p.m. PT.
(Credit:
MySpace)
It's about time: MySpace's formerly desktop-only instant-messaging client, MySpaceIM, is going in-browser. The company is beta-testing it with Canadian users but plans to roll it out to other English-speaking countries (including the U.S.) over the next few weeks and then to other regions in the following months.
To be fair, MySpaceIM is already accessible from the Web-based Meebo.
The new MySpaceIM, anchored at the bottom of the browser window in its own toolbar, takes a format quite similar to Facebook Chat. It can also pop out into its own browser window. You can, in addition, IM with MySpace users who aren't on your friends list, something that I don't quite understand the benefits of, or you can toggle the privacy settings to always be "invisible" or to only accept IMs from people you've already approved as friends.
The News Corp.-owned MySpace isn't ditching its downloadable desktop IM client, though. The two are interoperable, the company said.
My experience has been that many Facebook users have simply turned off Facebook Chat. But with a younger, more entertainment-focused feel, MySpace may have better luck with in-browser IM. And it's a strategic tactic, too: Having lost the membership-count battle to Facebook months ago, MySpace is trying to increase its edge in user engagement.
To that end, it started letting its members edit photos on the site last week.
Web-based chat and IM company Meebo has announced a few updates to its "Community IM" chat project, which it announced this summer as a means to power live chat features on partner sites. More specifically, there are more partners on board to add to the original eight.
According to CEO and co-founder Seth Sternberg, putting Meebo on partner sites will mean that it has a reach of more than 70 million people worldwide. Eventually, there will be ads placed on the chat app, and revenue will be split between Meebo and the partner in question.
As was the plan this summer, movie site Flixster will be the first to roll out Community IM support. Meebo CEO and co-founder Seth Sternberg said that this will be a snail-paced launch. "It's going to do a small rollout over time with a bunch of different partners, mostly because of scaling concerns," he explained. "We wouldn't want to roll it out to everyone all at once and then have the system collapse."
Sternberg said that the company has been smart with its expansion, given the fact that live chat takes a lot of hardware power, and high server costs have been cited as one of the factors that could doom a hyped start-up. "Meebo serves like 35 to 40 million unique (visits) a month right now, on what I think is 150 or less servers. For the number of uniques that we have, our server count is very, very low," he explained. "The server count is certainly going to grow with the Community IM...obviously that's going to put one heck of a strain on the back-end system, but that said, we're being very, very careful."
The current roster of Community IM partners, an array of blog sites, small social networks, and gaming sites, includes: AddictingCames, Bleacher Report, DanceJam, Dhingana, Fanpop, Flixster, GlobalGrind, IBeatYou, MyYearbook, OrangeShark, Piczo, PerfSpot, SparkArt, Sugar Inc., Tagged, UGame.net, Yaari, Zinch, and Zorpia.
Meebo debuted an ad network early this year and opened up the API for its "Meebo Rooms" group chat app.
A look at Flixster, with a Meebo IM window in the bottom right corner.
(Credit: Meebo/Flixster)Web-based instant-messaging company Meebo has taken a new step forward: bringing its IM technology to partner sites. This fall, Meebo will start powering IM "buddy lists" on a handful of social-media sites so that you can chat with your friends who use those services. They're calling it Community IM.
Right now, the partners announced are the MC Hammer-backed DanceJam, movie fan site Flixster, teen social sites MyYearbook and Piczo, MTV Networks' AddictingGames, SparkArt, women's blog network Sugar, and Tagged.
Altogether, that's more than 54 million users worldwide for Meebo, according to ComScore. But that list will get longer before the service launches, co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg told me earlier this week. Developers are welcome to check it out now.
The technology itself will undoubtedly remind you of Facebook Chat, the instant-messaging feature that the social network launched earlier this year. It's controlled through a menu bar at the bottom of the site, and will let members know which of their friends are also logged on. The catch is that the window can also pop out, and you can migrate your buddy lists from the likes of Flixster and AddictingGames into the broader Meebo client. Ad revenue will be shared.
Meebo developed the service in response to customer requests, Sternberg told me. And he said it's much-needed, considering traditional IM services often don't reflect all the people with whom we socialize online. "IM is the last communication paradigm that's closed," he told me, and said that Meebo's thinking was to "create one open, federated IM network." It's based on the Jabber open-source platform.
So why make the announcement months before the launch? Sternberg explained that it's mostly to raise awareness and build up interest. But in addition, he said, it's going to be a big project to launch, and he's hoping that engineers looking for jobs will take notice and send their resumes his way.
I'm In Like With You, a social-network-turned-gaming-site that caught a brief flurry of press for its eye-popping design when it launched, has just closed a $1.5 million round of venture funding led by Spark Capital. It's the first funding the site has received since its angel round last year.
In addition to Spark, the round includes current investors Baseline Ventures, Betaworks, and veteran investor Ron Conway, as well as an investment from Netscape and Ning founder Marc Andreessen.
The funding round was widely rumored as the site--having failed to live up to the hype it first generated as a flirty social network--started rebranding itself as a hub for social games but would clearly need more funding (or a corporate parent) to do so. Founder Charles Forman, a fixture on the New York digital-media social circuit known for handing out giant business cards and owning a seemingly endless supply of pink T-shirts, was introduced to Spark's Bijan Sabet through other local young entrepreneurs late last year.
In a phone interview, Sabet praised Forman's creative vision and willingness to completely change the site's direction when he saw a new opportunity in the growing niche of social gaming. I'm In Like With You is keeping its trippy, cartoonish design but the focus is now on multiuser casual games like Blockles, Gemmers, Draw My Thing, and an impending game that involves hamsters.
To complement the funding round, Forman has started expanding his team, including the hire of Skype veteran Poojitha Preena as chief operating officer as well as several game developers. Forman told CNET News.com that the entirety of the $1.5 million would be used to throw a large-scale party, but we think that one's a joke.
On Friday, a rumor surfaced that Facebook would be launching an internal instant-messaging service . Then, on Saturday, gossip blog Valleywag suggested that launching the IM service would involve acquiring Social.IM, a Facebook application that enables instant message chat between services like AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live Messenger. A Social.IM exec coyly told Valleywag, "If we're being bought, I haven't gotten the call yet."
Social.IM's coy tease at getting acquired by Facebook.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)Social.IM is supported by venture backing from Valley icon Peter Thiel, who also has invested in Facebook.
One thing Valleywag didn't note is that in response to the rumor on Friday, Social.IM representatives had posted to their blog a fake IM conversation between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a Social.IM representative. The dialogue consisted solely of that famous exchange between Star Wars' Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in which Vader (Zuckerberg) attempts to coerce Skywalker (Social.IM) to join the Dark Side.
On Saturday afternoon, the blog post was pulled from Social.IM. Perhaps that's because the undertones of the faux-conversation indeed hint at an acquisition, or at least joke about the possibility of one.
"You have only begun to discover your power," the Vader-Zuckerberg character reads. "Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy."
(Poor, misunderstood Darth Vader. Sounds like all he ever really wanted was to help the world communicate more efficiently.)
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