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URL Shortening Options Get Tr.immed

Monday, 10 August 2009

Trim Over the weekend URL shortening service tr.im decided to call it a day. They posted the following statement:

"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 anointed 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."


What tr.im say is true, there is almost no way to monetise URL shortening, and its easy to see why they’d be disgruntled at Twitter choosing a default service from the many popular ones out there.
Does anyone know the reasons why Twitter made this choice in the first place (aside from having to move away from tinyurl because, well, the URLs aren’t tiny!)?

It will be interesting to see what happens in this fledgling market place.
Is this the first of closures that will see a complete move away from dedicated shortening services to ones which are simply a bolt on of another, more monitisable site (such as su.pr). Or will one service (bit.ly?) become super-dominant and create a shortening monopoly (if so how would that work, the paths would eventually become too long, they would have to shift to another domain or recycle URLs...?).

Why did I use tr.im – two reasons, firstly the URLs really were short, at least one character shorter than bit.ly, and secondly the easy to use, easy to view stats that came with it.
What other URL shorteners are there out there that provide this sort of service? A while back Danny Sullivan did a study and survey into this, and has this morning promised an update to the chart... so we shall see!

UPDATE: mashable reports bit.ly have "offered to host [tr.im's] url mappings starting tomorrow", although whether this happens, or whether bit.ly simply buy tr.im for a nominal fee, remains to be seen (tr.im blog: "For the record, I will not sell the domain name to spammers or speculators for any price").

Comments

MarkeD

"Or will one service (bit.ly?) become super-dominant and create a shortening monopoly"

Looks like that may be the case - news just in that Bit.ly are buying tr.im - http://bit.ly/2VNqNa

Matt Whelan

I'm still not sure they'll sell to bit.ly - that's only mashable's suggestion... although it would make sense, I guess they would only offer them a nominal fee, if anything, and the guys at tr.im seem a little disgruntled, so they might just tell them where to go!

Joelchrist

Thanks for the suggestion. But now i don need to shorten my url.

Michael Thomas

I do not personally use twitter, but I know a few people who do, and they have shown me over websites that do this. I think it is cool but does it have any power regarding SEO?

seo california

u cant use it on seo it does not add weight to your link no anchors text cause it is just a redirect from the site but the traffic u get from twitter might might in your campaign.

help desk software

Thank you for your message! It is great useful for me

Bahrain website design company

Thanks for sharing the info.Shortening the url is one method of the On page optimization.This helps to add quality and thus PR for the site.


Hire a magento developer

Great article.I like your thougths and it's really great.Great discussion.Thanks for sharing.

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