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tr.im posts

Filed under: Web services, Open Source

Tr.im's open source relaunch begins, already running behind schedule

Tr.im's history is already a bit of an oddball saga: it was shut down, brought back to life days later, handed over from a company to one of the company's individual employees, and then made open source. Well, now the open source promise is becoming a reality, but not as quickly as developer Eric Woodward had hoped. He's announced the first open source release of Tr.im - if by "release," you mean "at least a few more days of work to do before the release." The bigger news is Woodward's plan to hand the Tr.im domain over to a third-party custodian. Much like the open source version of Tr.im, that's also still a work in progress.

On the development front, Tr.im's login and authentication module still needs to be fixed, and there are a few more days of bug fixes to do. As for the third party that might hold onto Tr.im, Woodward has only written that talks are in their final stages, leaving out the important detail of who he's talking to. This all seems like another tease to draw out the Tr.im story while people might still be interested. I actually still use Tr.im, but I'm less interested in its business dealings, and more interested in whether it works properly.

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Open Source

Open source MURLS submits links to multiple shorteners

Still concerned about whether or not your favorite URL shortening service is going to go belly-up and leave you with a pile of broken links? Hedge your bets with MURLS.

The tiny, portable application is plugged in to 28 different services including popular ones like bit.ly, tr.im, is.gd, and tinyurl. Each shortener is selectable in the MURLS options screen, so you can create as few or as many truncated links as you please.

Just double-click any URL in the list view and it's copied to your clipboard for easy pasting into Twitter updates or anywhere else you need to send abbreviated links. By default, the app sorts created links by length - shortest links first.

MURLS can definitely be a useful little app for link sharer -- I just hope this doesn't lead to Twitter updates with a dozen shortened links crammed into the 140.

Filed under: Business, Utilities, Web services, Open Source

Tr.im goes community-owned, takes shot at Bit.ly

The drama around URL shorteners doesn't appear to be ending any time soon. Here's a quick recap, for those who haven't been following:
  • Tr.im, the fourth most popular URL shortening service, shut down because of the insurmountable advantage its competitor, Bit.ly, gets as a result of being the default URL shrinker on Twitter.
  • A couple of days later, Tr.im was back, still angry about the perceived Bit.ly monopoly, but ready to continue operations or sell to someone who would.
  • According to Tr.im, Bit.ly offered Tr.im $10,000 for its domain name and all of its links. Tr.im said no to this and other reported offers.
  • Meanwhile, Bit.ly joined a coalition of similar services, called 301works, to create an archive of shortlinks, in case a shutdown like Tr.im's should happen again in the future.
That brings us up to today, and Tr.im's announcement that it's going to be community-owned. By positioning Tr.im as the people's URL shortener, the site's operator, Eric Woodward, hopes to achieve a large enough market share that Tr.im's collection of links can be a meaningful (and open source) data set for analysts. Tr.im has split off from parent company Nambu, and Woodward has agreed to personally cover any shortfall in Tr.im's operating costs.

In his blog post announcing the community-owned model, Woodward criticizes the 301works group as a Bit.ly publicity stunt that will be ineffective in solving the dead link problem. He's quite clear that Tr.im will not be joining 301works, and that community ownership is a better way to preserve links in the future.

Filed under: Web services

Short URL saga continues: major services form 301works coalition

In the aftermath of the quick shutdown and restart of popular URL shortening service Tr.im, several important players in the short URL market have joined an effort to archive short links in case other services shut down. The coalition is called 301works, and it will be run by Gnip. Other participants include Adjix, awe.sm, betaworks, Cligs, URLizer, and urlShort, and the most popular service going, Bit.ly. Even after giving users a scare that their links might be going away, Tr

301works will function as a directory of shortlinks, so users of the participating services should be able to see the destination of any short link, even if that service stops operating. 301works will be to short links what The Wayback Machine is to dead websites. It's not a guarantee that every link will always resolve, just that you'll be able to see where it pointed when it did.

Filed under: Utilities, Web services, Microblogging

W.tf?! Tr.im not closing after all

Tr.im, one of the most popular URL-shortening services, shut down last week because its owners saw no way to monetize the service in such a competitive market. Twitter's choice of Bit.ly as its default link-shrinker means that service dominates the market, with smaller players like Ow.ly abd Tr.im fighting over what's left.

Tr.im has its supporters, though, and they apparently contacted Tr.im's owners, Nambu, in such high numbers that the service has now re-opened. Creating new links seems to work fine, and all of your old URLs should be right where you left them.

Was this whole thing a publicity stunt, intended to bring greater visibility to Tr.im? Nambu says no.

They're still looking to sell Tr.im so it can live on, but not to "an unknown group or individual" who might compromise users' existing Tr.im links in some way. I believe that this wasn't a publicity stunt, although there's little doubt it brought the service quite a bit of extra attention.

Nambu just seems to have realized that they had little to gain by shutting down abruptly with a message that basically claimed Tr.im was practically worthless. The overwhelming user response seems to have made Nambu realize that's no way to sell something.

Filed under: Web services, Microblogging

Tr.im gives up and shuts down

Tr.im, the popular URL shortener owned by Nambu, was apparently not popular enough for the company to see any future in it. Tr.im is shutting down, and links will redirect properly until at least the end of this year. The cost of development and server expansion outweighed the benefits to Tr.im's owners, according to a blog post, because users will never pay for shortURL services.

Nambu also appears to be experience sour grapes over Twitter's decision to use Bit.ly as its default link shortener. The Tr.im blog says that "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."

It's a crowded field, and some players eventually had to be pushed out, but it's a shame to see Tr.im go. I think it was a better product than Bit.ly in some ways, and I'm all for competition and user choice. Too bad Nambu doesn't feel the same way.

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