tr.im, and all it’s links, enter deadpool
Tr.im is throwing in the towel, the first high-profile URL
shortener to shutter its doors in what has become a rather saturated market,
with Bit.ly and TinyURL at the top.
The question on everyone’s mind is, what happens to all the
links?
A quick search of Twitter finds that many users are going
through tr.im to shorten their links.
It is expected that the tens of thousands of tr.im links
will simply lead to dead ends if the company fails to find a buyer by December
31, a probable scenario, which it indicated on its blog this morning.
Delicious founder Joshua Schachter – an advocate for the
death of URL shorteners – raises the question in his blog: what if all URL
shorteners were to follow the same route and “the great linkrot apocalypse
causes all of modern culture to disappear in a puff of smoke”?
Chaos, likely. Confusion, definitely. And millions upon
millions of lost bits of valuable data.
For marketers, the vision of a complete URL shortener fail
should send chills down their spines, with all that information and traffic
hanging by a thread.
The demise of tr.im reveals a vulnerability, the soft
underbelly, in the service.
Ominous too are the words straight from the horse’s mouth,
tr.im wrote: “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 anointed bit.ly the market winner.
“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 long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment,
or in the future.”
Luckily, in the age of Google, Facebook and Twitter,
innovation trumps all, and its wise to hedge your bets on bitly.
The company is flourishing. Despite the de facto appointment
by Twitter, bit.ly has its own visions of grandeur. The website is to launch a
Digg-like link aggregator, compiling the most popular web urls, with the
knowledge of what’s hot and upcoming before traditional trendspotters can get a
whiff.
Never having used tr.im, I am unsure whether it offered a
worthy product to bit.ly or not (and really, we’re just talking about making a
web address more compatible with Twitter, not a lot to compare and contrast),
but the simple truth is: there were just too many similar services out there,
trouble yes, which is exacerbated by the fact that there is “no way”
to make money out of it.
Consider bit.ly the URL shortening bellwether, if it goes,
we all go, and our links along with it.
Now if they could just get a grip on that pesky security
issue.
