bit.ly

/ Don

tr.im returns

I was sad to see that tr.im was shut down, quite unprofessionally, back in early August. And since then, the world moved on without them and everyone forgot they ever existed in the first place. In fact, if it wasn’t for a random twitter post by them yesterday, I would’ve never learned that they apologized:

Everyone involved at Nambu would like to apologize again for the hastiness in which we acted last Sunday, announcing the shutdown of tr.im by the end of the year.

…they regrouped, and are now transitioning to being open source and community-owned.

…and you have Eric Woodward‘s personal guarantee that he’ll take care of shortfalls in funding to ensure that tr.im never goes offline again.

/ Don

tr.im goes out of business

screenshot14

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.