The list of URL shorteners just got shorter.
According to a blog post by Nambu, the company is shutting its doors on URL shortening tool, Tr.im. After a number of attempts to sell the service, no companies in the Twitter space stepped forward to purchase and operate it in its existing form. Says the company, “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.”
In addition to a number of general URL shorteners such as bit.ly and TinyURL, Tr.im was also competing against site-specific services like StumbleUpon’s Su.pr and music URL shortener TinySong.
The company’s Twitter statistics (as with all URL shortening services) are used to determine and aggregate Twitter trends by Tweetmeme; however, as of today, according to the company these statistics “can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.” Tr.im links will continue to redirect until at least December 31, 2009.
