by The internet is a deadly and deceitful place. We all try to get along with each other while chasing our greater dreams into the depths of the ether. One thing you’ll need in your web journey is a “URL shortening” service that will condense a long URL into something easy to remember. TinyURL was the king, bit.ly is the new prince and tr.im is now the ugly court jester that committed suicide and then decided it was all a joke and came back to life three days later.
When you want to live front-and-center in a Panopticonic world by being a vested keeper of watched and shortened URLs, you are required to remain sane, cogent and proactive.
There’s no quitting in the URL shortening game!
Regretfully, we here at Nambu have decided to shutdown tr.im, the
first step in shutting down all of our products and services within
that brand.tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough. We
simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay
its network costs, which are not inconsequential. tr.im pushes (as I
write this) a lot of redirects and URL creations per day, and this
required significant development investment and server expansion to
accommodate.
Two Days Ago, But a Little Later in the Day:
We wanted to make another update to make one thing clear some users have missed from the homepage notice: All tr.im links will continue to redirect until at least December 31, 2009. We will not be turning tr.im off for redirections.
Also, the API will continue to operate until further notice.
All software and services have plenty of time to remove tr.im without
user disruption. The only thing down is the tr.im website itself, and
URL statistics presentation.
We have restored tr.im, and re-opened its website. We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the popular response, and the countless public and private appeals I have received to keep tr.im alive.
We have answered those pleas. Nambu will keep tr.im operating going forward, indefinitely, while we continue to consider our options in regards to tr.im’s future.
Okay, so is it me or is it tr.im that’s crazy here?
Isn’t it about time for them to quit again?
tr.im is now the Sarah Palin of the URL shortening services!
How can tr.im ever expect to be taken seriously again when they keep quitting and then coming back?
Here on the Boles Blogs Network, we used to use tr.im to compress our URLs, but their service was incomplete and getting tech support to kindly and cogently help us was not a pleasant experience that we wanted to repeat. We are happy that very few of our compressed URLs are at risk with tr.im’s bizarre behavior in the marketplace.
We then tried bit.ly and loved its quickness and intuitiveness.
Sometimes one product is just inherently better than another and that’s what gives them mindshare in the marketplace — not a friendship with the Twitter powers.
I wonder who will foot the bill for tr.im? It’s a more sensible URL than bit.ly in that it tells you exactly what it does (am I reading bit.ly wrong?) but we don’t need no quitters around these parts! 🙂
I don’t know who will save tr.im, Gordon, when the company says they can’t afford to maintain it an nobody else wants it.
Bit.ly is strange, but “is.gd” was even stranger! Bit.ly is now the Twitter default for truncating URLs — it used to be TinyURL — so whatever “little bit” of Bit.ly will get you is what we all got now.
I agree about the quitting part — if any user signs up for tr.im after they quit and then recanted — then they’re bigger losers than the quitters!