After some problems in the last week or two tracking stats (often they’d show zero hits), URL shortening service tr.im shut down suddenly this morning around 8am AEST, citing lack of investment:
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.
Personally I liked tr.im, but with its demise the quest for the ultimate URL-shortening service continues. Search Engine Land has a good list from April.
I’ve signed-up for bit.ly, and it looks okay, though already I can see one annoyance: it tracks everything by US time, with no apparent options to change that.
And I guess I’ve got about 4 months to manually go through the best of my Tweets and save the expanded tr.im URLs — something I started doing last week to prevent any future problems with stuff I’d written being lost.
Interestingly at least one of my older URLs from tinyurl.com (which has a very good record, having been around for 7 years) looks to have been corrupted: http://tinyurl.com/34sov somehow points to http://51744jqgt36.jqgt36/JQGT36 instead of http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/10/so-you-think-yo.html Odd.
Another example: http://tinyurl.com/263hx would have linked to some media article I think; now it goes to a Polish photo web site.
Update Tuesday: More interesting reading on tr.im
- tr.im RIP — official post from the company, Nambu
- Was denial-of-service attack the final straw for tr.im? — Sophos’ Graham Cluley’s blog
Update Wednesday: tr.im is back… for now.