Tr.im Miraculously Resurrected

Nambu Networks does seem to have a knack for the dramatic. Just days after closing down its URL shortening service Tr.im and making quite a stir with its veiled accusations of monopoly, which have some solid points, the site is now back up and running “indefinitely” due to “popular response.”

“We have restored tr.im, and re-opened its website. We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the popular response, and the countless public and private appeals I have received to keep tr.im alive,” the company wrote on the Tr.im blog. “We have answered those pleas. Nambu will keep tr.im operating going forward, indefinitely, while we continue to consider our options in regards to tr.im’s future.”

The 'saga' started two days ago when Nambu Networks, Tr.im's parent company, announced that the service would be shut down with the site being closed immediately and all of the links shared with the service having until December 31, 2009 at which point they could become useless.

The company failed to achieve any financial rewards from the service and it believed that the market was pretty much closed, as Bit.ly, a competing service and the dominating URL shortener, with close to 80 percent of the market, was favored by Twitter, being the default shortener for the microblogging platform.

This sparked several discussions, the most heated one being about the validity and the risks associated with this type of services, which had their fair share of criticism already. In the event that one provider was to close, like this one, or go down for any reason the millions of links shared with it would become useless. The other issue was about the fact that Twitter had effectively picked out the winner in the market by making it the default service, something that it was well within its rights to do though, and about whether this was a deterrent for developers wanting to build services or apps associated with Twitter.

After the announcement, it was Bit.ly itself that offered a helping hand, either by taking over the links or by hosting them in the archiving project it set up, 301works. These proposals were rejected by Tr.im, which preferred to sell the product for $80,000 to $100,000. Well, you can't sell a dead service, so Nambu decided to bring it back up and keep it going until it finds a suitor for it. It also insisted that “this was not a public-relations stunt. At all.”