URL shortener Tr.im gets cut off

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10306202-36.html

by jacquesm • 17 years ago

22 12 17 years ago

news.cnet.com

treitnauer• 17 years ago

Also see 10 Tools to run an URL Shortener on your own Domain: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752144

jeroen• 17 years ago

An earlier thread on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=751415

greyman• 17 years ago

I must say that I don't very much like the attitude of "we didn't figure out how to monetize and nobody wants to buy us, so we just shutdown". For another type of business it might not be such a problem, but for URL shortener, which creates "ten thousands" links per day, it will just create a link rot and is not responsible towards the Internet.

I hope the future URL shorteners will think twice whether it is clever to even start it.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

Agreed completely. If you don't have a long term plan other than to get bought out it is better if you don't even start.

And running a url shortener costs very little money. If you do it without a plan it's pretty irresponsible.

I'd be happy to take over their business and keep it running for free, future continuity guaranteed.

I've been in business for well over a decade now and I don't think a couple of tens of megabits and a few machines are going to break the bank here.

In fact, I think I'm going to write them a note.

EDIT: ok, sent Eric Woodward an email with an offer to continue to run tr.im as a public service, not-for-profit (I fail to see how you could run it for profit anyway...).

warp• 17 years ago

I'd say using url shorteners creates "link rot and is not responsible towards the internet".

Ofcourse, on twitter you often have no choice, but I blame twitter for not solving that problem.

mtkd• 17 years ago

This does worry me about the integrity of services like Twitter in the long term.

You could be in a position 10 years from now going through your old Twitter feed for something and it is completely unusable beyond a certain date due to Tinyurl or Bitly having closed down.

Maybe an opportunity for some startup to begin spidering and recording all shortened URLs into some big historical index.

It would be a goldmine if one of the big ones ever closed down.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

I think if you come across something that you like on services like twitter or fb that if you want to have access to it ten years from now you'd better archive the whole thing.

Hardly any webpage lives that long, in spite of the 'urls should never die' recommendation. In practice urls live a couple of years at best, go find all those good things you found on geocities or myspace a couple of years ago...

The web is like any society, things have a life-cycle, links have one (where the content gets moved or the short url dies), pages have one, and websites have one too.

Routinely universities wipe the 'students' directory when the new year starts, companies will remove entire product lines from their websites (including all the documentation) when their support for the product ends. The web is very much 'current affairs', preservation of the past is not the biggest priority. Archive.org tries to combat this but it's a losing battle, they can't buy drives fast enough to keep up.

Bookmark collections need periodic maintenance because of this anyway.

Worst case there is always your printer. And storage is cheap, for the little bit of content that you come across that you really wish to preserve. A USH stick will hold a surprisiingly large amount of webpages.

gaius• 17 years ago

not responsible towards the Internet

1) Link shorteners are used mainly by the Twitter crowd 2) None of them have anything important or interesting to say anyway

I don't see what the problem is.

zaius• 17 years ago

I wonder how much they'd sell it for. It seems a waste to just shut it down.

woodsier• 17 years ago

The blog stated something along the lines that they couldn't sell it, because there was no apparent way to monetize it.

jasonkester• 17 years ago

"One commenter on the Tr.im blog post suggested that perhaps the service could live on in the form of an open-source project"

That was my favorite bit of the article, ignoring the fact that URL Shorteners are all essentially open source already. (There are technologies that can put up a working version with a dozen lines of code.)

The humorous part was the assumption that "open source" is this magic concept that can fix anything. Got a service with crippling server and bandwith costs? Open source it so that... um... you can run it on the open source servers? Do they have those?

ovi256• 17 years ago

And on open-source electricity and bandwidth! And open-source sysadmins. This is how software meets the Real World, where finite resources are finite.

I think what is actually meant is a volunteer community service. People could donate time, money or servers towards running the service. Tr.im seems like a good candidate, as it's an unfortunately critical service that simply holds your links hostage.

URL shortener Tr.im gets cut off

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