Nambu Networks has announced that they will be shutting down their Tr.im URL shortener. New links are no longer being created, and existing short URLs will cease to function on December 31, 2009.
Regretfully, we here at Nambu have decided to shutdown tr.im, the first step in shutting down all of our products and services within that brand.
tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough. We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential. tr.im pushes (as I write this) a lot of redirects and URL creations per day, and this required significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate.
This is what a lot of doomsayers (doombloggers?) have been afraid of. Imagine the millions of Tr.im short URLs that will no longer work once the service goes down, despite the fact that the location they point to still exists: Link rot, as it is called, on a massive scale.
I’ve shortened many links with Tr.im in the past. My auto-tweets of blog posts were shortened with Tr.im for a time, and for the past few months I’ve had my default shortener in Tweetie set to Tr.im. I’ve probably created a few hundred Tr.im links, none of which will work come December 31st.
Personally, I’m hoping that someone will step in and buy them out so the links don’t go away. Perhaps Bit.ly? They seem to have monetization plans, and they’re definitely in it for the long term. A large collection of new links, with a secondary domain, wouldn’t be a bad acquisition.
All this makes me wonder, will more publishers be getting their own short domains so they don’t have to outsource short URLs to other services? Should I be registering a short domain for my posts, and for other links I might tweet?
