Tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service

by tlrobinson • 17 years ago

104 115 17 years ago

pj2• 17 years ago

And the house of cards begins its collapse.

Let's hope it crumbles fast and we can rid the web of these shorteners before they cause more damage to the future of the internet.

endtwist• 17 years ago

One failure does not a trend make.

If another service flops in the next few months, then yes I agree, the house of cards is collapsing, but right now that statement is a little premature.

tlrobinson5• 17 years ago

It's inevitable, whether it's in the next few months or in 5 years, we're going to end up with millions of broken links.

joshu4• 17 years ago

Lots of these services are failing. I found a huge list of them once and MORE THAN A THIRD were marked as "defunct"

ubernostrum2• 17 years ago

The argument against URL shorteners is specious, and taken to its logical conclusion is an argument against anyone ever linking to anything: any URL might turn up gone in the future, and you have no way of knowing or predicting which ones will last. Amazingly, the web's managed to survive this.

But if you're genuinely concerned that this poses some sort of threat to the web, start an archiving service which preserves mappings of short -> long URLs, or talk to the archive.org folks to see if they'd be interested.

PostOnce• 17 years ago

That idea in the second paragraph of your comment is good. Someone ought to do that.

As far as the first, though, I think that you've got it wrong. It's not the same as any old site breaking. Say a person, over time, links to eight sites in his forum comments, and one goes down. Seven links are still valid. If he uses a shortener service that collapses, none of his links are valid.

keyist• 17 years ago

So let's promote the URL shorteners that are open and provided as free services, instead of those who try and sell click information.

http://ur1.ca is free software and provides a text format download of all its mappings right on its home page. Not a fan of shorteners, but that's the one I'd use for posting services with char length restrictions.

joshu4• 17 years ago

Straw man fallacy. A is like B and B is bad. Try again.

The argument is that it makes things MORE fragile, by interposing another party into the resolution chain. Given that it is both easy to do (thus there will be lots of competitors) and hard to profit at means that this party is more than usually vulnerable.

Anyway if the content dissapears, then it is gone. A url shortner failing means the failure could occur even if the content is still available.

Therefore, by definition, it is worse than the other situation.

pvg• 17 years ago

It's taken to a conclusion but not a logical one. A further conclusion based on that 'logic' would be that nothing at all should be made as anything might turn up gone in the future heat death of the universe.

Joshua Schachter has a nice summary of the arguments against that you may have seen before: http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html

Summary of the summary - URL shorteners have poor usability, providing little, often zero value at the cost of adding further centralized points of fragility.

webwright• 17 years ago

No, it's really not.

Please explain why this (my last tweet):

"3x recommended dose of Vitamin D slashes cancer risk by 77%: http://is.gd/28Nbq

is better than this:

"3x recommended dose of Vitamin D slashes cancer risk by 77%: <a href="url">2005 Academic Study</a>"

I can see why you'd URL shorten when pushing to SMS, but an actual anchor/href gives me the ability to mouse-over and see the target URL and the link isn't dependent on a 3rd party to work. No one can frameset the url without the linkers permission or shove ads into the experience.

mynameishere2• 17 years ago

OTOH, they could be used as failsafes. If a normal link dies, tinyurl or whatever could go to a page that says,

"This link seems to be missing. Do you know where it moved to?" The responses could be published as long as the 404 continue. I have to think someone has already thought of this.

martey• 17 years ago

If the link is missing, the author/website admin should use a 301 code, not 404. See http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10...

ams12• 17 years ago

hopefully bit.ly's api will expand to cover stuff you could do with tr.im, like aggregate user statistics-- seen in dave winer's 40 twits app (http://dave.40twits.com/)

TweedHeads2• 17 years ago

Two things:

First, I don't like URL shorteners for this same reason. Every web server should be in charge of managing long and short urls easily with just one line of code.

Second, how expensive it is to keep the site running? $10 a month for a cheap hosting service and they can make more than that with just google ads.

Now, if they want to live largely just by shortening urls then no, it won't pay the bills.

ams12• 17 years ago

more details on why it went down: http://blog.tr.im/post/159369789/tr-im-r-i-p

larrywright• 17 years ago

A couple of points:

1) Url shorteners aren't going away. Like it or not, there's a need, particularly for things like Twitter.

2) I think it's more than that. They did more than just shorten urls, they also tracked analytics on those links, clickthrough rates and the like. You can view charts and graphs about how often links are clicked on, etc. Multiply that by millions of links, and it's not an inconsequential amount of storage and bandwidth. I think you way overestimate the capabilities of a $10 hosting package.

jerf2• 17 years ago

All the $10 package would have to do is forward the user, though. It wouldn't have to do all that stuff.

That said, it probably isn't quite a $10 package. On the other hand, it probably wouldn't take much, especially if you cared to take the time to write a custom-purpose HTTP-redirection server.

Actually, that would sort of be an interesting programming challenge: How small and efficient can you get such a server?

rythie4• 17 years ago

Other than for twitter I don't see the reason for them really. Tinyurl was around from 2002, but was not heavily used until Twitter used it.

brk• 17 years ago

How many $10/mo accounts do you know of that would give you the server resources and bandwidth needed to scale an application like this? Granted the resource utilization overhead is very small compared to many other apps, but with even a smidge of popularity, this is not a $10/mo hosting app.

Since my comment has been modded down to 0, surely someone has more information about tr.im and can post some examples of $10/mo hosting sites that could run it.

soult2• 17 years ago

If you remove the statistics and the url submission form, so that only the redirection is kept alive (= no broken links) I think a $10/mo account should be sufficient.

matt1• 17 years ago

Any guesses on how much it costs to keep one of these running in terms of money or effort?

soult2• 17 years ago

If you only want to do redirection, no statistics stuff, then pretty cheap. If they don't want submission of new links, even cheaper, they could even run it on shared hosting.

scorpion032• 17 years ago

It should be fairly straight forward to dump these "lookup table" databases to Appengine, in which case, it wouldn't really cost anything.

With many of these url shortners going out of business pretty soon now, anybody willing to try and make this a business opportunity?

dannyr• 17 years ago

These Url shorteners became popular because of Twitter. Twitter should handle links differently (e.g. not count Urls against the 140 char limit).

jorgeortiz852• 17 years ago

SMS doesn't care what kind of characters you're sending.

TweedHeads2• 17 years ago

SMS can't click on links either, so just send the word LINK and get done with it.

slig• 17 years ago

twitter should have their own url shortener.

wmeredith• 17 years ago

I believe they do and it's called bit.ly...

tlrobinson5• 17 years ago

Ironically bit.ly thinks tr.im is spam: http://bit.ly/2JXXZ

goodkarma• 17 years ago

I thought that was pretty ironic too

joshu4• 17 years ago

Most systems HAVE to mark shorteners as spam, given their use.

Can you think of reasonable and serious reason to shorten another shortener?

drawkbox• 17 years ago

I think there is good behind short urls but they should all be same domain. Relying on a third party for links embedded everywhere will now be worthless for users of tr.im.

Short urls are good but also readable urls are better. The whole short url thing stems from twitter and is being originally based on SMS. But it is breaking the web when this happens and not knowing what you are clicking on is a security problem.

I could see a case for a corporate service for short urls like mycompany.tr.im/YHu8 or just mycompany.com/YHu8 etc. Then it redirects to a longer url within the same company. But it needs to be guaranteed to be there as long as the linked to endpoint exists.

byrneseyeview• 17 years ago

I wonder how easy it would be to create an archive.org equivalent for URL shorteners. Any shortener could pay a fee (based on the number of links they had) in order to join, in exchange for which they'd get some form of certification that they were members. The archiving service would be a nonprofit with publicly viewable finances, and would make copies of partial or full link databases available for further download and backup.

If it caught on at all, it would do two things well: 1. it would mean that there were few good reasons to use an un-certified link shortener, and 2. it would make the transition to a post-shortener world much simpler and more graceful: twitter could just download the full data set and repeal the character limit for URLs.

tlrobinson5• 17 years ago

http://permanize.org/

codyrobbins2• 17 years ago

Yeah, but how is Permanize any different than a URL shortener itself — what happens when Permanize goes out of business?

pronoiac• 17 years ago

They're not hard to crawl & save locally, at least: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=TinyURL

superjared• 17 years ago

A large reason of why URL shorteners are hard to maintain is the incredible amount of spam they receive. At Slicehost we seem to get spamcop emails every day about yet another URL shortener someone has created because the spammers will use their link instead of the real URL.

pg• 17 years ago

Most url shorteners are banned on HN (in the sense that stories using them are autokilled) for that reason.

ivankirigin3• 17 years ago

You could auto-lengthen the URLs. Twitter has a useful tool for this, e.g. http://search.twitter.com/hugeurl?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.c...

rythie4• 17 years ago

Surely freezing the service so that no new urls could be summited would solve that problem but still keep the links alive.

YuriNiyazov3• 17 years ago

What is "a minor amount"? I'd buy it for $1000

Mystalic• 17 years ago

Same. Maybe they'll get bought with this.

telegraph• 17 years ago

May I ask why? How does one monetize URL shortening, anyway?

YuriNiyazov3• 17 years ago

Frankly, I don't know right now, but $1000 seems to be obscenely low for a site that gets what seems to be a decent amount of traffic on the web.

mryall2• 17 years ago

I'd buy the domain name, but I suspect it will go for a lot more than $1000.

rythie4• 17 years ago

Bait and Switch would be one way. The founders probably wouldn't want to sell to someone doing that though.

joshu4• 17 years ago

Not surprised in the slightest...

jorgeortiz852• 17 years ago

Startups die for many reasons, but I can't help but feel the ones tr.im gives are a little dishonest.

   There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening --
   users won't pay for it

Users won't pay for web search either, and that has monetized very well.

   We just can't justify further devleopment since Twitter
   has all but annointed [sic] bit.ly the market winner.

Umm, when tr.im got into this business, Twitter had "anointed" tinyurl the "market winner". If it was worth it to compete against tinyurl regardless, why isn't it worth it to compete against bit.ly?

nir4• 17 years ago

When they got into the business, Twitter wasn't such a big deal, though. (Personally I believe Twitter will go back to not being a big deal in a few years, but so would URL shortening in general)

minsight• 17 years ago

"Users won't pay for web search either, and that has monetized very well."

Tell that to excite, altavista, yahoo, etc...

jmonegro• 17 years ago

Heck, Microsoft used tr.im

radley• 17 years ago

This is a reference to "tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately."

Please don't make up your own titles, especially when they don't match the content.

callahad• 17 years ago

In know that in the past TinyURL has adopted the domain and databases for failed shorteners in the interest of preventing link rot. Maybe Tr.im should toss an email to Gilby?

jdr5• 17 years ago

there must be enough content/news websites they could partner with. twitter is not the only business out there

acangiano• 17 years ago

Apparently they can't afford a spellchecker either.

ajg1977• 17 years ago

Rather than say that no one was interested for "token amounts" of money, I wish they would put the service up on eBay or accept closed envelope bids.

I'm sure they would get something for it, I myself would be extremely if the price was right.

That said there seems to be the same air of fatalism in both their attempts to sell the service and the reasons for giving it up.

rythie4• 17 years ago

This could be damaging to Twitter since it will raise a lot questions about the viability of short urls. It may force them to either buy bit.ly or start their own service.

jbellis• 17 years ago

http://blog.tr.im/post/159369789/tr-im-r-i-p

> this required significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate. tr.im has thousands and thousands of users, creating tens of thousands of URLs per day

10K urls per day x 1000 hits for statistics = 10M hits per day, each of which is a read (duh) but also a write to keep a hit count. That's 120 reads + 120 writes per second.

Most of the distributed nosql options can easily handle that on a single node, and the non-distributed ones generally have even higher one-node throughput.

Not to be an armchair architect, but url mapping is pretty simple. Sounds like they were using a bad tool for the job if they were having to throw hardware at it.

iheartmemcache2• 17 years ago

An avg of 240 dbIO/s is entirely different from peak time IO/s. When someone like Jeff Atwood posts a link using their service, they could easily see 10x the volume. Volume might be really stagnant for 45 minutes, then bam, 10 percent of their req's for the hour come in within a 2-3 minute span. Judging by their blog-post, I'm assuming they needed to have the infrastructure to handle that kinda load.

Either way, I modded you up for a pretty thorough analysis (and because I largely agree with you (it basically is a mapped 301 Location: http://newsite/)). From my armchair standpoint(1), a 256 mb slice + Redis + nginx should be able to handle 10x the volume easy.

(1) Well not quite armchair, a good 30 percent of my firm's business is directly related to scaling.

mahmud• 17 years ago

Well not quite armchair, a good 30 percent of my firm's business is directly related to scaling.

Your user name didn't hint at that at all.

SwellJoe• 17 years ago

Interesting that one of the commenters is Dave Winer, and he seems to think tr.im represents viable business opportunities.

rishi• 17 years ago

How much to purchase your service?

codyrobbins2• 17 years ago

Given that they're shutting down, why isn't Tr.im simply releasing a complete copy of their URL mappings?

There's no need for some industry-wide URL shortener consortium to archive links. Just give out your mappings if you happen to go out of business, so someone could decode your URLs manually if they really needed to.

mbrubeck• 17 years ago

There are sure to be some private (unpublished) URIs in there, some of which may contain sensitive information. (Users shouldn't submit such URIs to third-party shorteners, but of course they do anyway.)

Edited to add: Of course, those would also be picked up by groups like archiveteam.org that are brute-force crawling the shortener URI space.

tnaleid• 17 years ago

Here's a more appropriate link to the story: http://tr.im/w7Ba

pkrumins• 17 years ago

that's what you get when you use url shorteners - broken links to your website.

sammcd• 17 years ago

I really think there is some room here for blogs and news sites to provide their own short urls that people can use to link to them. They might be able to reap the benefits of a higher page rank.

Another good side affect is that urls might get cleaned up a bit in hopes that they will get copied straight into a tweet. I would love a web with short copy and pastable urls.

trezor3• 17 years ago

It pretty much says it all when this company's* only hope of turning a profit was getting someone to buy them. If your business plan is getting bought and leaving someone else with the bill, you have no business plan.

(*) Not entirely sure I would consider a 20 line PHP script a company.

treitnauer• 17 years ago

What about running an URL shortener on your own domain? Here are 10 tools to do it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752144

jasonkester• 17 years ago

Business Opportunity:

- Buy these guys out for whatever they ask

- Repurpose the site as a Jenny Craig style weight-loss business (or pretty much any other business that you like) on the site

- Redirect all those useless tr.im links to your new tr.im homepage

Suddenly you have a business with 10M unique visitors every day. It's like buying ALL the advertising, all at once. You now have 40 zillion inbound links to your thing. If you can't make money from that somehow, there's something seriously wrong.

So yeah, just do the big bait & switch. When the complaints roll in, 301 them over to the old tr.im team. After all, it's them who sold you the domain, so they should take the blame.

known• 17 years ago

Doesn't URL shorteners break PageRank?

Tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service

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