URL Shortener tr.im To Go Community-Owned, Open Source

Death Metal sends word that the owners of URL-shortening service tr.im are in the process of releasing the project's source code and moving it into the public domain. This comes after reports that the service may shut down and that they were entertaining offers from prospective buyers. From a post on the site's blog: "It is our hope that tr.im, being an excellent URL shortener in its own right, can now begin to stand in contrast to the closed twitter/bit.ly walled garden: it will become a completely open solution owned and operated by the community for the benefit of the entire community." They plan to complete the transition by September 15th, and the code will be released under the MIT license. In addition, "tr.im will offer all link-map data associated with tr.im URLs to anyone that wants it in real-time. This will involve a variety of time-based snapshots of aggregated destination URLs, the number of tr.im URLs created for any given destination URL, and aggregate click data."

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[X0563511]

Or, you can just use tinyurl. This gives someone the option to use the preview.tinyurl.com subdomain, which will put you on a landing page and not automatically redirect.

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[nstrom]

The original use of URL shortening services was to prevent link breakage in e-mail and nntp clients that linebreak after 80 characters. They still work great for this. http://tr.im/wGhA [tr.im] works a lot better in e-mail than http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1600+pennsylvania+ave,+dc&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=49.624204,58.359375&ie=UTF8&ll=38.898732,-77.038515&spn=0.012007,0.014248&z=16 [google.com] . I've also heard shortened links used to good effect on internet radio, where it's easier to direct listeners to a tinyurl than a long forum URL, when there's discussion about a certain thread.

Re:.im Isle of Man

[Big Hairy Ian]

I used to live there it is a Protectorate of The Crown pretty much like Jersey, Guernsey & Gibraltar except the weather is not as good

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[Razalhague]

Like most social networking websites, it's because other people are already using the site.

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[Zerth]

"I'll e-mail you the address"

Their email client mangled the url and they don't know how to play "turn this character soup back into a valid url".

Re:These Guys are Masters of PR

[ergo98]

Oh I entirely understand the absurd niche that it started through. However not only do most people use Twitter through mechanisms not at all bound by the SMS limit, are we to believe that someone posting a tweet from SMS first went to a URL shortener on their mobile device, got a shortened URL, and tweeted that? It doesn't happen.

URL shortening + SMS = a ridiculous combination.

Re:These Guys are Masters of PR

[pauljlucas]

[A]re we to believe that someone posting a tweet from SMS first went to a URL shortener on their mobile device, got a shortened URL, and tweeted that?

No, but I never made that claim.

URL shortening + SMS = a ridiculous combination.

I don't think so. Presumably, the reason URL shorteners exist is because there are some things that can't handle long URLs well. As I stated elsewhere, broken e-mail clients that wrap long URLs funny was the raison d'etre for URL-shorteners. However, since SMS also can't handle long URLs, it would seem a legitimate reason to use a URL-shortener for SMS.

While nobody would send an SMS message containing a shortened URL from a mobile device, those who choose to receive SMS messages to a mobile device can benefit from shortened URLs. A trivial example would be links to news stories from a Google-Alert-type service.