With Twitter’s 140-charcter limit on updates, several URL shortening service cropped up in the last 18 months out of nowhere.
A few months ago, Twitter added bit.ly support to its homepage, effectively making it the most popular URL shortener out there.
It didn’t help rival tr.im:
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.
In short, tweets will survive, but the links in them will probably die at the end of the year.
While it’s always sad to see players in a market disappear, tr.im’s death does serve as a reminder that URLs shortened for ease of use cannot be considered permanent. Heck, even normal URLs can change with easily and without end users being notified, but when tr.im goes under, expect some disruptions.