Thomas Otter

The demise of a URL shortening service, Tri.um  made me think a bit about the Internet generally.

There are decades of science, engineering, standards, governance and accident that have created the protocols that make the Internet work. Its openness, flexibility and to use Zittrain’s term, generative nature, are in a  large part  because the Internet isn’t owned by one company.

When you shorten a URL, you are no longer relying on the "Internet" to direct readers to content, you now rely on the provider of the shortening service.  URL shortening today is a very useful feature, but it is not generative. You create a single point of failure, and you now rely on that company continuing that service, and that in turn depends on the capricious nature of the market. It makes navigation proprietary rather than open. It creates a taxation point where previously there wasn’t one.

The post from the CEO is very illuminating.

tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough. We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential. tr.im pushes (as I write this) a lot of redirects and URL creations per day, and this required significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate.

tr.im has thousands and thousands of users, creating tens of thousands of URLs per day. But, we were a little surprised to learn, *no one* wanted to take it over. We quietly contacted a number of people within the Twitter development world, and nobody wanted it in exchange a token amount of money. No one perceived any value in it, or they wanted to operate a shortener under a differently branded domain name.

And, users will not pay for URL shortening, and why should they?

And, the data that tr.im generates — the hottest links that people are sharing right now — is all well and good, but everyone has this data. tr.im gets hit by countless bots every day farming this data to create and operate websites such as tweetmeme.com. So, *everyone* has this data, meaning it is basically worthless *by itself* to base a business on (as bit.ly and others are attempting to do) at least in our humble opinions.

And finally, Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further. What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future.

So, in summary, there is simply no point in continuing to operate or work on tr.im, and we are moving on to greener pastures. We appreciate all the support and kind words about tr.im we received over the past 12 months, but change is ultimately good, and bit.ly can more than accommodate your URL shortening needs.

 

My personal view is that URL shortening shouldn’t be a product, it should be a standard. HTML works precisely because no one company owns it. I’m not sure that URL shortening should be any different.  Today I view URL shortening as ephemeral. At best a scribble on a scrap of paper. If you need to bookmark something for keeps, keep the full URL. But I’m not sure that I want to see any company control an increasingly important part of how we navigate the Internet.

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Category: internet software industry     Tags: internet, URL Shortening

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