The Begining of the End: tr.im Shuts Down

The popular URL shortener tr.im just announced it will be closing down immediately, with URLs working until December 31st, 2009 (the full text of their announcement is included below). And tr.im was no small operation. So now what happens?

Well, the biggest outcome of this is that all tr.im links will be dead by early next year. That means links that anyone has tweeted, emailed, or posted at any point in the time since its inception will be dead and broken. This only reinforces the gigantic problem with URL shorteners; it is crippling the infrastructure of the internet. Yeah, it's bad.

tr.im says they're shutting down because they can't monetize their service, and that bit.ly has "won". This is the problem all URL shorteners face, including our own urlShort. There is no real way to monetize it yet. The value lies, of course, in the information like link popularity and growth over the social web, but that data is still not perfect. Sure bit.ly offers it, but they aren't even charging for that information.

So what does the closure of tr.im, and those other URL shorteners that will follow, mean for the average user? Well, for one, we shouldn't be shortening links at all via third parties, but it's a bit too late for that to change. If there were a solution it would be for Twitter to build its own URL shortener for links on Twitter, or just exclude URLs from the 140 character count and avoid this whole mess. But that can't fix the damage done already. Users can't do much to avoid this mess aside from running their own URL shortener using something like the urlShort project. But not everyone has a server to run this on.

Instead, content publishers should offer shortened links with their own domain name. Services like awe.sm offer a hosted way to do this for a cost, and open source alternatives like our own urlShort could also be an option for publishers. This way, the short links would only die if the content publisher took them offline, which they would (hopefully) only do if they were forced to take their content offline as well. While it's not perfect, it certainly beats relying on third parties to stay alive so your links still work.

While tr.im may be the first large short URL service to go down, it certainly won't be the last as bit.ly continues to grow and competitors continue to fail to find ways to monetize themselves. It'd be best to just do away with short URLs, but that'll probably never happen. Instead, we must look to alternative ways to deal with the problem, rather than relying more and more on others.

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 development 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.

Read the followup story Why No One Should Trust tr.im (and Nambu in General)