Tr.im URL Shortening Service Closes its Doors
The popular URL shortening service Tr.im has announced it is shutting down. That means, just as critics of URL shortening services predicted, a whole lot of shortened links are about to disappear in a black hole.
Or maybe not. The developers of Tr.im say that the service will remain running through the end of the year, so your old links will “continue to redirect until at least December 31, 2009.” The post goes on to say, that Tr.im “will not be turning tr.im off for redirections” and the homepage claims that “your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.”
The wording is bit vague, but the way we’re reading it is that while the Tr.im shortening service is dead as of now, the redirections will continue working until the end of the year. At midnight on December 31 all your Tr.im URLs will turn into pumpkins and vanish into the ether. Or perhaps the developers of Tr.im plan to leave the redirect engine going indefinitely, though that seems highly unlikely.
Either way, Tr.im’s saga is pretty much a textbook case of why URL shorteners are a bad idea all around.
The most obvious problem is that shortened URLs could lead anywhere -��� a spam site, a phishing site, a porn site, a malware site, who knows?
Of course this isn’t a new problem. Twitter may be responsible for thrusting URL shorteners back into the mainstream, but the idea began as a way to fix the shortcomings of some e-mail clients (like Outlook), which often wrapped long lines, making links impossible to click on. However, URL shorteners quickly fell out of popularity — the proliferation of spam and link hijacking made most of us reluctant to click on something that could lead, well, anywhere — until Twitter made them favorable again.
Then there’s the problem of long-term viability of your links. As is being illustrated now with Tr.im’s demise, a shorterner adds a second possible point of failure, making shortened links even more vulnerable to “link rot” than standard web links.
Perhaps the cost won’t be that high in the end, Twitter is after all not really an archival service. That is, most people don’t dig too deep into their own, or other users, archives so perhaps all those links will die and no one will even notice. In the meantime, most users will migrate to more popular, feature-rich and long-standing services like Bit.ly, the most popular, and TinyURL, currently number two.
Still, if nothing else, Tr.im serves as cautionary tale for anyone interested in creating archival short URLs — do it yourself. There are several options for sites to run their own URL-shortening services, including the excellent Awe.sm.
[Also worth noting, it appears that Nambu, one of our favorite native OS X Twitter clients, will be shutdown as well, though its final fate appears to still be up in the air]
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