Tr.im Closing Down, Blaming Twitter

Boston (DbTechNo) - A popular URL shortening web site has had to close down because of the success of Twitter.

The site in question, tr.im is used to shorten urls and is very popular for web masters not wanting to show the urls to their web sites.

If you visit their home page, you’d read the following message in which they partially blame the hack on Twitter for their own downfall.

“tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

All we can say to this is: RIP tr.im.