Tr.im Concedes Victory to Bit.ly

The Tr.im URL shortener has discontinued service. Tr.im was actually one of my favorite URL shorteners and I’m sad to see it go. Being an avid user of social media, I have shortened a lot of URL’s in my time. To think that many of those will suddenly go dead in less than a year is pretty disturbing. As I’ve mentioned before, my mother actually introduced me to this service and it was the first time I saw a shortener do statistics. When I just told her they were shutting down, she did the Home Alone face and she has good reason to be upset.

As far as URL shorteners are concerened, there is a constant debate as to whether they are actually safe to use. In a world where we try to shove as munch information into 140 characters as possible, they have been an extremely useful tool. It would be almost impossible to fit links into a tweet without using a URL shortener of some kind. This heavy use of shortened URL’s have become a backbone of how we share information, or more like an Achille’s heel.

The entire Internet is based on links. One of the words often used when trying to describe what we have is “ecosystem,”  but to me it’s more like a city. Those links are like the DNA of the Internet. Without them, nothing goes anywhere and nobody could really find anything. What we have done with URL shorteners is to build parts of this city with inferior materials. You have the main parts of the city constructed with brick and mortar, but then there are these sub-divisions full of prefab houses built on sub-par foundations. These are the networks built on URL shorteners.

Tr.im shutting down shows us exactly how fragile this system of information really is. Any links shortened using Tr.im should work until December of this year, but what about after that? You can’t go back and change a Tweet, IM, email, or status update on Facebook. How many blog posts, Craigslist ads, and Squidoo lenses are going to need updating lest all the links on them go dead?

The main reasons Tr.im sites for cutting off service are interesting in a few ways. They say that no business they approached would purchase them, which is understandable given the sheer proliferation of URL shorteners out there. It’s also so easy to create your own URL shortener. Tr.im states that there is no way for them to monetize URL shortening and that “Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.” This statement seems odd to me because, while saying there isn’t a way to monetize URL shortening, they also say that a rival shortener has achieved some success. Hopefully, they will be purchased before the year is out and all of our Tr.im’d URLs won’t become dead ends. I guess we will have to wait and see how this develops.

Category: web 2.0 | Tags: bit.ly, tr.im