grahamGrafx

marco:

… 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 devleopment 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.

There are two stories here: how sad it is that this type of tool, despite being extraordinarily cheap and easy to operate, isn’t worth running for one of its most successful players, and the inherent danger that this shows in relying on shortened URLs for anything other than temporary, disposable use.

This will reorganize a little bit of the internet. Image there are some one way roads in your city, not commonly traveled, but they are there and some people use them. Then all of a sudden a whole bunch of road close down abruptly. Some people saw it coming and switched their travel routes, some didn’t. Traffic is reorganized blocking some short cuts people use. It’s a small change, but certainly a change to the layout of the city. In the topography the web some places became a little farther to reach or invisible to search bots.