14 DAY TRIAL // It didn't take long for solutions to be proposed after the announcement of the URL shortening service Tr.im's shutdown. Bit.ly, the reason why it was closing in the first place, has approached Nambu Networks, Tr.im's parent company, inviting it to join the 301works project, which aims to be an open archive for shortened URLs. Not surprisingly, though perhaps not the best choice for Tr.im's users, the company rejected the offer saying that it planned to sell the service for a rumored $80,000 to $100,000.
Tr.im announced that it would be closing after failing to make any headway in the crowded and – it claims – unfair market. The main reason behind the closure was Twitter's preference for Bit.ly, a competing service that is now used as the default URL shortener for the microblogging platform, giving it a – some say – unfair advantage and market dominance, with an almost 80 percent share. The closure won't come until the end of the year but there were many worried about what would happen to all of the links after that. Bit.ly, in fact, came up with a solution, asking them to join the 301works project, which aims to be a repository of shortened links created for just this type of occurrences.
“Back in April, we reached out to several of the leading URL shortening services to suggest a wayback machine-like approach to archiving the mappings of the URLs. [...] We thought this was a useful idea — something that was inexpensive to execute and important for the industry. That said; tr.im along with other services said no thank you.” the Bit.ly blog reads. “I reached out to Eric at tr.im yesterday after hearing of the announcement and offered to host the URL mappings in perpetuity. He doesnt see the need for this right now — his interest is in selling tr.im.”
While Bit.ly's offer has been rejected, Tr.im is looking to sell the service altogether for as much as $100,000. While there have been some interested parties there are no clear proposals yet but the company does note that it won't sell the service to spammers or speculators and that Tr.im will still work at least until December 31, 2009. Nambu Networks may also be closing its desktop client as well and stopping all development on Twitter-related products as it seems to be saying in a recent blog post.