tr.im

» see tr.im as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Nambu Network shipped tr.im in 2008, into a market TinyURL had invented and Twitter's character limit had made urgent. It had the best name in the category, two letters and a dot and two more letters, and unlike most of its competitors it gave you click statistics on every link you made. For a stretch of 2009 it was the shortener people chose deliberately rather than the one their client picked for them.

Then in August 2009 Nambu posted a notice saying tr.im was finished. The reasoning was blunt about the economics: there was no revenue mechanism in shortening links, and Twitter had just made bit.ly the default for everyone who used the website. Existing links would keep resolving for a while. New ones would not be issued.

The reaction was not the sympathy Nambu seemed to expect. Millions of tr.im links were already sitting inside published blog posts and archived tweets, and every one of them was about to become a dead end. Within days the service was switched back on while Eric Woodward looked for a buyer, and on 17 August he announced a different plan: tr.im would go open source and become community owned, with Nambu renouncing the domain and releasing the code by 15 September.

The source did come out. The community-owned shortener never did. tr.im carried on quietly for another seven months, and then in April 2010 the front page turned into a headstone that read tr.im R.I.P. and listed fourteen competitors you could use instead.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the 301works argument ~

The August scare produced one durable idea. Bit.ly proposed 301works, a scheme where shorteners would deposit their mapping tables with the Internet Archive so that a company failing would not take its links with it. The pitch was that a redirect is infrastructure and infrastructure needs an escrow arrangement.

Nambu wanted no part of it. TechCrunch reported on 10 August that tr.im had cut the 301works idea off because the mapping table was the only asset it had to sell, and handing it to an archive would hand away the sale. That exchange is the clearest statement anyone made of the problem: the thing that makes a short link valuable to its owner is exactly the thing that makes it fragile for everyone else.

~ what actually killed it ~

The R.I.P. page did not blame bit.ly. It blamed spammers. Abuse was constant enough that hosting providers kept threatening to terminate the account, and somebody at Nambu was manually deactivating links by hand long after they had done their damage. The line that ended the notice is the honest one: tr.im had always been no man's land, not interesting enough to justify continuing, but with a name too good to escape being abused.

Redirects were still promised through the end of 2010, with the API left running so that software with tr.im built into it would not break overnight. I was a working engineer in Turkey by then and I never once chose a shortener. The links in my feed had already been shortened by whatever client posted them, which is the whole reason a shortener dying is somebody else's decision about your archive.

~ the afterlives ~

The domain outlasted every version of the service. By June 2011 tr.im was answering again with a login box and a copyright line reading 2008 to 2011, under hands that were not Nambu's. In July 2012 it served a bare Apache directory index. In January 2013 it said Be Back Soon! and nothing else.

A year later two people named Matt and Greg had it running as a shortener again, with a note on the About page explaining that tr.im had made millions of trimmed URLs and then decided to take a little hiatus one day. That version grew into a marketing attribution product with a retargeting pixel in every link and ran until roughly 2021. After that came a WordPress install, and after that the advertising placeholder that answers today. Four owners, and the only thing any of them actually bought was the name.

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