When I travel to far-off lands, I’m bemused by the oddity, the other-worldliness of ordinary grocery market shelves, where indigenous patrons must think I’m insane. I remember quite distinctly a flock (troupe? herd?) of Swiss interns—colleagues at my first dot-com gig out of college—marveling over an entire aisle of white bread. Personally, I thought they were verrückt. However when I spent a vacation in Bërn, I clearly couldn’t find one loaf of wonder bread at the nearest Coop or Migros. Read more
Humor
tr.im goes out of business
Without trying to sound too bitter about it, tr.im announced today that they’re no longer offering their services in the URL shortening war against bit.ly and TinyURL:
tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.
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.
We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.
There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t
justify further devleopment since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.
We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.
It truly is unfortunate as I really liked their services with reporting and statistics, though the site was 90% visual fluff and the offering was otherwise no different from bit.ly or TinyURL. Now I just have to find a way to apologize to the clients that I recommended their services to.