Url Shortener Tr.im Shuts Down – What happens to your links now?

Url shortener, Tr.im has been deadpooled – it’s shutting down, effectively immediately. Here’s the statement available on their home page:

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.

Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t
justify further devleopment since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

We don’t know how many links are out there in the wild that have been shortened using the Tr.im url shortening service, but with the popularity of these services becoming so prevalent in the past year or so, it’s safe to say – probably a lot, like millions. And at the end of the year, those links you shortened using their service will start throwing errors. Nice.

So what do you do now? Go to a different service? Do you really have a choice?

I use three url shortening services – Tinyurl, bit.ly and is.gd for simple sharing of links on Twitter but I’m making the transition soon to my own shortener, on my own domain that I have complete control over. It’ll be used only by me, not the public.

That way, I’m responsible for my own links, rather than relying on someone else’s service.

The more control you give up to others online (or off) the more chance there is of something like this happening.

Farewell Tr.im. It’s never good to see a cool app deadpooled.