Tr.im trimmed by Twitter

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There is soon to be one less URL shortening service – tr.im has announced that it is ending its service.

Existing users will have their links continue to work until December 31, 2009.  Why is tr.im ending? According to tr.im they just couldn’t make any money at it – and oh yeah Twitter squeezed them out.

“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,” tr.im stated on its website.
“There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.”

Nambu, the company behind tr.im had tried to sell off the tr.im service but according Nambu, no one wanted to pay for it. Add to that the fact that it costs money to keep the service running and well – it was only a matter of time until tr.im would end.

“Users will not pay for URL shortening, and why should they?

And, the data that tr.im generates –  the hottest links that people are sharing right now –  is all well and good, but everyone has this data. tr.im gets hit by countless bots every day farming this data to create and operate websites such as tweetmeme.com,” Nambu wrote developers wrote in a blog post.  “So, *everyone* has this data, meaning it is basically worthless *by itself* to base a business on (as bit.ly and others are attempting to do) at least in our humble opinions.”