URL shortener tr.im is throwing in the towel, and sends some blame to Twitter since they prefer competitor bit.ly. Fair enough, I’d say, and some players in the URL shortening field is bound to fall off in the coming months. Nambu’s tr.im just happen to be vocal about it in a blog post.
And finally, Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further. What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future.
All tr.im links will continue to work until December 31, 2009 at the very least, says the manager. It might, however, not be an issue at all since Mashable reports how bit.ly apparently have offered to take over the reins. Makes sense, why not grow the service with all the tr.im links after all?
This is a reminder that shortened URLs might suddenly disappear, or point to some other place altogether. What if tr.im were sold to someone dishonest? That would be a lot of links trying to trick you into buying fake Viagra. Luckily, that doesn’t seem to be the case here, but it is worth remembering when shortening URLs in the 140 character conversation.
