Nambu trims tr.im URL shortener

Stephen Withers
Monday, 10 August 2009 12:18

Business IT - Technology

So while a number of tr.im's users are bewailing the loss of their preferred shortener and we sympathise with the people behind any venture that doesn't make it, the impending demise of one URL shortener among several does not seem a great loss to the broader Internet community.

Nambu officials said they could no longer justify the costs of running and improving the service. Attempts to sell tr.im failed.

"No one perceived any value in it, or they wanted to operate a shortener under a differently branded domain name," officials said in a post on the tr.im blog.

Another part of the problem was that "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."

Nambu's main product is the Nambu social networking client. The current beta release supports multiple Twitter accounts, but FriendFeed, Ping.fm and Facebook facilities were planned.

However, it sounds as if that project may also be on the way out, or at least about to undergo a radical change. The latest post   on blog.tr.im includes the statement "We are simply accepting the business reality of the situation, and moving on. Life is not fair, and such is life as a Twitter developer (which none of us here will be any longer). We are all actually excited at pursuing larger opportunities, of which there are many."

The good news is that Nambu is doing the right thing and turning down offers from "spammers and speculators" to buy the domain name. So in a few months time, a tr.im link might not take you to the page you expect, but it shouldn't take you anywhere nasty.

If short URLs are important to you, it makes a lot of sense to generate and redirect them on your own website. Software is available for this purpose, and that way you know that the short URLs will last as long as your site.