RIP TR.IM URL Shortening Service

The URL shortening website tr.im has decided to discontinue services. As a serial Internet entrepreneur I am very sad to see this happen to such a young company. There are lessons to be learned when a service of this nature decides to shutdown. One of the lessons in this case was lack of monetization. The tr.im url shortening website had a hard time making money. They found it difficult to charge users for the service and were also impacted heavily by Twitter selecting bit.ly as the thoroughbred race winner. I will end this by saying a great domain name is only half the battle.

Here is a statement issued on there website:

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, 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 development 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.

We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

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There are free scripts available to create your own URL shortener. If you don’t want to depend on an outside URL shortening service then you should set one up for yourself. I setup pimping.in with that exact idea in mind. For those of you who have questions on this process, I will be detailing it in a future blog entry!