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.
My Yahoo Mash profile, soon to get euthanized.
(Credit: Yahoo)File this one under the "ouch" category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.
An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, "Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available."
Mash didn't really offer anything new, other than the fact that instead of inviting friends you created profiles for them and then invited them to customize and change them. You could also add "modules," a sort of rudimentary version of social-network apps. It was designed as a quirky, cute step up from Yahoo 360, the social network that Yahoo had based off its millions of pre-existing user accounts; if Yahoo 360 was analogous to AOL profiles, Mash was more like Facebook.
But Mash never caught on, and its parent company has now deemed it worth closing.
This is not the first time that Yahoo has launched an experimental social network only to yank it. Last year, Yahoo shut down a Dodgeball- or Brightkite-like mobile social site called "Mixd" that had only been in operation for a few months.
Bolt.com, best known as a video sharing site that didn't really catch on, has filed for bankruptcy and shut down. The site had been in acquisition talks with GoFish, which would have been able to cover the $10 million settlement in a copyright infringement case with Universal Music. Earlier this month, the acquisition fell through, and Bolt was essentially doomed.
But it was really MySpace, not YouTube or copyright woes, that struck the first blow to Bolt. Before it shifted its focus to video, Bolt was a teen-oriented social networking site in the days when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was probably getting beat up on a playground somewhere. You could create a profile, talk with other members in chat rooms and message boards (this was the pre-webcam era), and engage in other forms of 1998-vintage "interactivity," like online quizzes and polls.
Bolt circa 2001, thanks to the Internet Archive.
(Credit: The Internet Archive)I was a teen in the '90s and had a Bolt profile out of curiosity, but those were the days when Internet social networking was still a very restricted phenomenon for a number of reasons: first, it was still seen as "weird" (and from parents' perspectives, dangerous) for teenagers to be socializing online rather than in real life; and second, AOL was still a juggernaut in those days. Its chat rooms and message boards, not to mention Instant Messenger, were the go-to place for kids who didn't feel like doing their homework. Then there was the fact that chatting and message board posting was, thanks to the limitations of dial-up connections, more or less all you could do. The infectious draw of viral videos and streaming music was still out of reach for many.
The critical mass wasn't there, so there was no real bandwagon effect to help Bolt grow. Then MySpace came along with its originally music-focused model--if My Chemical Romance has a social networking profile, it can't be just for losers, right?--and online social networking lost much of its "a/s/l?" stigma (that's "age/sex/location," one of the Web's oldest pickup lines, for you newbies). Bolt probably could've found some way to "evolve" and get the word out, but it didn't--the video-site makeover flopped amid the current glut of YouTube clones.
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