Tr.im Resurrected

http://blog.tr.im/post/160697842/tr-im-resurrected

by chris24 • 17 years ago

35 49 17 years ago

blog.tr.im

Semiapies3• 17 years ago

"This was not a public-relations stunt. At all."

Please.

Why exactly should anyone have any trust in such a statement from people who shut down their service with little or no advance warning, but could bring it back up "indefinitely" after some "appeals"?

Banzai10• 17 years ago

Actually they didn't shutdown their servers, they gave a warning that they would be shutting down by the end of the year.

Semiapies3• 17 years ago

True. I guess I was one of the people thrown by their "effective immediately" notice that they had to clarify, and I hadn't seen the clarification. It was only a partial shutdown.

Still, I remain skeptical; this company hasn't earned much trust from me.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

They shut down everything except redirects for existing URLs. You couldn't create new URLs, or view statistics of your URLs.

Kadin• 17 years ago

They weren't shutting down their service; they were actually being very responsible about it -- they were going to stop taking new URLs for redirection, but continue to maintain the previously-created ones until the end of the year.

It's not like they suddenly announced "we're pulling the plug, screw you all." It seemed like a considered decision, made from a position where they could afford to wind down the service over 6 months.

I think their decision to not shut down may be frankly irresponsible. Their reasons for closing seemed fair: bit.ly has a monopoly on URL-shortening due to Twitter; there's really not a market for more than one or two URL-shortening services; there's no clear way to monetize URL-shortening unless you're the dominant player (and can sell stats); any sale to a third party risked turning the service into something evil that they had ethical problems with; keeping the service open would just burn money and effort better spent on other things. All, to my mind, valid reasons for closing.

Deciding to reopen (or not close) because a bunch of people complained -- people who aren't going to solve any of those fundamental issues -- that seems like the questionable decision.

They were doing the right thing, but seemingly got talked out of it. It doesn't make sense.

Semiapies3• 17 years ago

1) Suddenly not taking new URLs is a partial shutdown.

2) It is a questionable decision that doesn't make much sense. One of the few scenarios that seems remotely sensible is that this was an attempt to attract attention, particularly from investors who might be interested in a service with such an enthusiastic following that they'd "appeal" to the company to keep it going.

3) If not investors, then buyers: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/trim-cuts-off-bitlys-30...

alain94040• 17 years ago

there's no clear way to monetize URL-shortening unless you're the dominant player (and can sell stats);

How much money is Google making from selling all the stats that they gathered on people's behaviors, cicks, etc.?

The problem with URL shorteners is that there is no space to put ads.

Oompa2• 17 years ago

Not a PR stunt? Sure seems like one from my perspective.

axod• 17 years ago

If it is, it's inventive. And I'll bet it results in a good hike in traffic+interest.

aaronblohowiak• 17 years ago

Kids these days!

In fact, laws were passed to stop the practice of having a "going out of business sale" when the business was not failing because it was once a common advertising strategy. In some states, you even have to register such sales with the Attorney General

nir3• 17 years ago

If it is a PR stunt, it's pretty crass. But I doubt it's PR - they don't make any money on links, so a hike in traffic just means more costs.

Considering that they did intend to keep the old URLs functioning, and that users can get the same free service from dozens of URL shorteners, the whole thing just seems weird.

kwamenum862• 17 years ago

Whether this was intentional they were able to generate renewed interest in this product and to an extent their company.

scott_s• 17 years ago

Not from mine.

They're one of many competitors in an eco-system that's relatively easy to enter, other competitors have a significant advantage over them, and I have no idea what their business model is. When they said they no longer wanted to sink money into their project, I understood why.

I also understand that people often feel entitled to free services, would complain when one goes away, and they might not have been prepared for that kind of social pressure. I understand giving in to it.

Oompa2• 17 years ago

I understand that too, but most of the people I saw talking about tr.im were saying "Go figure" not "Please stay". This on top of the asking bit.ly for money rather than saying "Ok" to keep the links working, while complaining about money issues.

It seems like this was a ploy to get people's attention for tr.im so they could try to sell it.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

What bothers me about the whole tr.im story is that they are basically complaining they are losing money hand over fist at the same time that they are saying that twitter will send their traffic to bit.ly.

So, what's the problem then ? Seems like your cost just went down, you should be happy about it, not complain.

If you can't make money at traffic level X because the model you are pursuing is broken then at level N*X you are in much worse shape. And yet, they seem to want to be in much worse shape...

mrkurt• 17 years ago

With the caveat that I found the general whiny tone annoying:

Direct costs may go down, since they have less URLs to worry about. But value goes down as well, since they have less data to mine. There may be some critical mass of data required to have anything of value.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

They're complaining about development costs and bandwidth costs.

I don't buy it.

A url shortener is relatively trivial to operate (at least, compared to some of the stuff I'm doing right now). It works, or it doesn't, once you've got it there isn't much you can do to make it better or add features.

So development costs are almost a one-time affair and it seems they had already done that.

What's left is the bandwidth cost.

A Mbit is about $5 /month in bulk. The average 'GET' reguest from a device is maybe 500 bytes, the answer, the redirect is maybe another 500 bytes. So say 1 Kbyte in total (generous!). 1Mbit / sec = 128 Kbyte, so that is roughly 100 requests / second for $5 /month. Serverload is trivial, a single table with a unique key, you can do 1000's of queries like that per second on a single box. It is a trivially parallel problem, simply distribute all urls across all machines. A single box could push maybe 100K requests / second using varnishd or some other front end cache (tr.im uses nginx), so that's maybe 800Kbit/sec out of one box.

You'll need a bunch of IPs otherwise you'll run out of sockets and you'll need some memory for the cache.

Calculate in some margin and you can cut that down to maybe 500 Mbit/sec, so that box would cost you $2500 / month and it would handle a staggering 62500*86400 = 5 billion requests / day.

No way tr.im is at that level, more likely a few tens of millions of requests per day, reduce bandwidth costs accordingly, say $500 to $1000.

It wouldn't take more than a bunch of google ads displayed to the makers of the urls or a donation to keep a service like that going, that's not a whole lot of $ to make on a site. One of my sites which converts absolutely horrible does that kind of money on 27000 visitors / day (mostly from Finland, don't ask...).

This will never be a business, and personally I really don't understand why the likes of twitter do not give a short url out on their own service. But it also does not cost a fortune to run, that's bs.

And if you want to create 'value' you should do something a little more sticky than a url shortener, it literally is a throwaway relationship with your audience.

And if you lock them out for a couple of days because you can't make up your mind if you're going to sink or swim you have really tossed your investment into the water.

adharmad• 17 years ago

They also seem to make it appear as if they are doomed because of the close relationship between twitter and bit.ly. Is twitter the only way URL redirectors can grow? Aren't there any others who want to do a one-up on twitter and can potentially use tr.im (facebook??) if they offer challenging reasons?

Secondly, if they have no business model, and they do not have any connections, they dont seem to have any options!

likpok2• 17 years ago

There doesn't seem to be much of a use for URL shorteners outside of twitter. Facebook statuses are much longer, and might just deal with embedded urls anyway.

jdunck• 17 years ago

Seems like there must be a buyer who is interested in saving the brand, or that there must be an adviser gave them a business model.

there• 17 years ago

darn.

jasonlbaptiste• 17 years ago

why is this site consistently relevant? It's a minority url shortener. If it were bit.ly or tinyurl, id understand. Even then, it depends on the spin. Flag button activated!

thisduck• 17 years ago

They keep listing bit.ly's monopoly by way of Twitter. But there is a better solution to the whole URL shortening issue, how about Twitter assigned a fixed length to URLs. So a url in your tweet is say 5 or 6 characters. And it always converts to ">link" (that's 5 characters).

Done, the URL shortening destroying the internet problem is solved. We've had URL shorteners forever, they've only become an issue because of Twitter. Twitter should just do away with it all.

stingraycharles• 17 years ago

Stop making sense!

The only solution would be for Twitter to acquire Bitly and their complex code base, how else are the inflated prices going to be justified ?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/30/if-bitly-is-worth-8-mil...

figital• 17 years ago

They could save space by letting me choose my own default URL shortener. I've got my personal domain listed on my twitter page. Say my home page is http://example.com. Just put something like <123456> into your tweet and your client would interpret that as http:/example.com/12346.

Otherwise they are the new Microsoft. ;)

michael_dorfman• 17 years ago

Since the tr.im saga has brought url shorteners to everybody's mind: anybody have an idea for a winning business model? I can't seem to think of one...

cookiecaper2• 17 years ago

All I can think of is a subscription-based model that would aggregate all of the URLs and give you stats on it. Like, $5/mo for a URL shortener that lets you see how much something has been clicked on, who clicked, when, and so on. This would also serve as a history of shortened URLs.

But really something like this is probably best rolled into the services that require them, like Twitter. Twitter should provide it, I think.

nir3• 17 years ago

Bit.ly offers this functionality, for free.

I think bit.ly are the only ones that have a chance of making real money. Their model is:

1. Build a very good URL shortening service

2. Have a close relationship with Twitter, get them to choose you as their URL shortener

3. Hope Twitter will get bought and then buy you, like they bought Summize for search.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

After a few weeks, redirect the incoming links to a splash page that redirects the user after 15 seconds.

Makes me feel skeezy just thinking about it.

imp3• 17 years ago

I like Awe.sm's approach. You own the domain and they do the URL shortening and analytics for you. Costs $99/year. I haven't used it, but it seems like a good way to make money in that area.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/04/its-awesm-create-a-powe...

thorax2• 17 years ago

This is also the the service we offer with TinyArrows:

http://➡.ws/info/custom/

For statistics, we provide info down to the IP address and user agent that clicked on the link.

SwellJoe• 17 years ago

I thought about using this service, so we'd have control over our URLs...but the fact is, I don't trust awe.sm to stay in business forever any more than I trust bit.ly or tr.im. In the end, I decided to implement our own (haven't actually done it yet, but this is one of those cases where the people claiming to be able to replicate this feature in fifteen minutes aren't exaggerating).

Interestingly, I guess, this did make me stop and think about whether I wanted links to my company and products to disappear when these shortener services finally all come crashing down. Which is why I decided I needed to control it myself.

I'd already bought a pretty short name a couple of years ago with the intention of putting up a mobile version of our site on it.

OmarIsmail• 17 years ago

I think there might be a play in the behavioral targeting market. This is similar to selling stats, but in a more commercial format, e.g. AlmondNet.

When a person submits a URL to the shortener, they analyze the URL to figure out what the content is about.

Then when somebody clicks on the shortened link, part of the redirect process is to implant a behavioral AdNetwork's cookie with the proper tags, based on the content that's already been analyzed.

You can then monetize the core service without interrupting the redirect flow.

adrinavarro• 17 years ago

Traffic looks attractive, but it's a problem when you don't get any benefits at all. By the way, I still don't see how is bit.ly going to stay alive.

But what if we had our own url shorteners? I could have my own shortener on my own domain (twitter won't re-shorten it), so there wouldn't be any privacity or volatility issues.

Anyway, we're still "lazy" people... so we have to live with it.

briansmith2• 17 years ago

Twitter won't re-shorten it now, but that could change at any time. What if Twitter wrote every URL to a bit.ly URL regardless of length? Would anybody stop using Twitter because of it? I doubt it. If they can find a way to make money w/ bit.ly then why wouldn't they?

tptacek• 17 years ago

I'm really meant to believe that Twitter can be expected to foster an ecosystem of URL shorteners? Can I instead be pissed that Twitter hasn't simply ended these efforts by not counting URL characters?

Tr.im Resurrected

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