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tr.im – the death of a URL Shortener
August 10th, 2009
I’ve been using tr.im for about 6 months now and have been a huge fan of the service. It offered analytics as well as some of the shortest URLs in the field.
However, I just noticed over on Mashable that tr.im is discontinuing its service effective immediately. This is of course shocking news and means that I will have to rearrange a number of my links. In fact, I’ve used some of the trimmed URLs in blog posts – but I can’t remember which ones!
Thankfully, I recently downloaded PrettyLink for WordPress, so at least I’ll be able to shorten URLs for my blog, and twidroid allows links through a few different services so, although it’ll be annoying, it won’t completely cripple me just yet…
However what worries me that companies can fall so quickly. I haven’t heard anyone speculating about the URL shortening business and yet, from the wording of tr.im’s announcement, it seems that it may be something that we need to be concerned about, and hope that the other services find a way to monetise this, especially in this twitter-centric web.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and get pretty linking…
One Response to “tr.im – the death of a URL Shortener”
This is a great point! People get so invested and all of this data is dependent on them staying in business … that's one of the reasons I wrote Pretty Link.
As for your problem with twidroid, Pretty Link has an API — but most of these twitter services like twidroid don't support it yet. I've contacted TweetDeck and a few others to see if they're interested in supporting it — but no luck so far. I'm hopeful that in the future more of these twitter apps will support URL shortening on your own domain using Pretty Link — because it would be awesome!