Tr.im URL Shortening Service Closes Shop

Tr.im, a very popular URL shortening site has closed their doors which will leave millions of shorten URL's no longer working at the end of this year. Yet another sign that we should not rely on URL shortening sites, especially for commercial use.

Tr.im blames Twitter because they went with bit.ly as their sole shortening provider leaving all of the other URL shortening sites out to defend for themselves in terms of gaining users.

The Tr.im site will continue redirecting until December 31st, 2009 this year but will probably stop thereafter. We've heard of talks that a lot of people are interesting in buying Tr.im so the site may not remain down for too much longer. A lot of users in the Tr.im community actually believe that this was all a ploy for Tr.im to generate a sale of the site or force commercial buyers into investing in the company.

Tech Fragments currently uses tinyurl.com for its shortening when we post to our twitter page but we are considering building something in-house now, along with a lot of commercial web sites that are wary of more URL shortening service closures in the future.