I just read on Mashable that tr.im url shortner was shutting down and that by 1/1/2010 all of the tr.im urls will stop working. The post mentions that the creator of Delicious has made the case against shortened urls. Is this the beginning of the end for URL shortners or is this just a case of one company not being able to keep up with the leaders in the market?
MktgRob 7 Nearly a Posting Virtuoso
Hirohurl 0 Junior Poster in Training
It's probably the latter... For example, StumbleUpon just recently launched a URL shortener with some extra features added in, and I doubt that they'll pull the plug on it.
InsightsDigital 57 Posting Virtuoso
articlemaster9 -13 Light Poster
MktgRob 7 Nearly a Posting Virtuoso
It turns out the demise of Tr.im may have been an elaborate publicity stunt. Within 1 week of shutting down they have gone live again and management is saying that it was due to the great clamour of loyal tr.im users. Other that what I posted about what I read on mashable, I heard nothing about the site/service shutting down. To be honest, other than a passing reference to it I had never really heard of it before the story on Mashable. And I did not read anything at all about a popular outcry on the internet to save tr.im. I am going with this being a PR stunt.
Hirohurl 0 Junior Poster in Training
Thanks for coming back and letting us know. I wonder if this kind of stunt (if that's what it was) really works... The one thing you don't want to happen is for a URL shortening service to shut down and leave you high and dry... So for such a company to play on that fear doesn't seem very clever, whatever the short term blip they might gain in publicity...
InsightsDigital 57 Posting Virtuoso
To be honest, I never ever heard of Tr.im until now. I bet you that now that site is receiving much more traffic.
MktgRob 7 Nearly a Posting Virtuoso
To be honest, I never ever heard of Tr.im until now. I bet you that now that site is receiving much more traffic.
And any added traffic will be thanks to a clever if somewhat misleading PR campaign. The question I have for the forum now is, would you try a similar PR stunt for your company if you thought it would work and not hurt your brand?
MktgRob 7 Nearly a Posting Virtuoso
Mashable is reporting that a number of the major URL shortening services are banding together and joining 301works.org as a way of providing protection and support to the smaller ones. Does anyone have any info on 301works.com?
InsightsDigital 57 Posting Virtuoso
I never heard of 301works.org but I found this very interesting post about 301works.
http://www.gnip.com/announcements/gnip-joins-leading-companies-to-launch-independent-url-mapping-directory-service
MktgRob 7 Nearly a Posting Virtuoso
In yet another bizarre twist to this whole story, tr.im's parent company Nambu Network has announced that it is renouncing ownership of tr.im and that the url shortening service will become open source. During the announcement the owner of Nambu took shots at bit.ly, which organized 301works.org to help save tr.im. Nambu ownership claimed that bit.ly was acting out of self interest and made an offer for tr.im.
Color me skeptical but I experienced a similar situation at a company I once worked for. One of our competitors made an offer to my company, not to acquire it, but to let my employer acquire the competitor with no strings attached in terms of management roles, company name or anything. They made this offer privately and with no fanfare in the press. My employer publicly denounced the offer and then allowed my company to be acquired by another company.
I think this whole series of events is nothing more than a PR stunt by Nambu who decided to unload a business unit that could not compete with the big names and did so in a way to make them look magnanimous (by giving the technology to the masses) while taking a parting shot at the company they couldn't compete with. What do you think? The url (unshortened) to the mashable article on this is below.
mackone 55 Posting Pro
Just because this one service is down doesn't mean the death of all URL shortners.
Member 784332 0 Newbie Poster
URL shorteners wouldn't be necessary if we started using shorter URLs to begin with. The links that Google uses are atrociously long. However, since URL shorteners like bit.ly have the added value of simply tracking, I feel they have staying power.
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