marco:

… 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 devleopment 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.

There are two stories here: how sad it is that this type of tool, despite being extraordinarily cheap and easy to operate, isn’t worth running for one of its most successful players, and the inherent danger that this shows in relying on shortened URLs for anything other than temporary, disposable use.

Rafer sez:
Anyone know the tr.im people? Let’s use this situation to start fixing the problems with the URL shortener world. Per my comment on Schachter’s blog:

@joshu

A possible solution; one i pitched to the bitly guys. It’s more passable than perfect, but I think it meets your criteria as long as the shortURL vendors use 301 redirects.
1. public publishing of all shortURL|baseURL pairs
2. release of server side JS (and/or an apache plug-in, or …) that subscribes to the shortURL|baseURL directory, stores all relevant URL pairs locally, and rewrites the locally used shortURLs to baseURLs at pageload, or in the DOM, or only if the shortURL provider has been timing out in that 5 minutes period, or [pick your criteria].

anybody know the Tr.im people? I’d like to be in touch.