
Tr.im Resurrected - chris24
http://blog.tr.im/post/160697842/tr-im-resurrected
======
jacquesm
What bothers me about the whole tr.im story is that they are basically
complaining they are losing money hand over fist _at the same time_ that they
are saying that twitter will send their traffic to bit.ly.

So, what's the problem then ? Seems like your cost just went down, you should
be happy about it, not complain.

If you can't make money at traffic level X because the model you are pursuing
is broken then at level N*X you are in much worse shape. And yet, they seem to
want to be in much worse shape...

~~~
mrkurt
With the caveat that I found the general whiny tone annoying:

Direct costs may go down, since they have less URLs to worry about. But value
goes down as well, since they have less data to mine. There may be some
critical mass of data required to have anything of value.

~~~
jacquesm
They're complaining about development costs and bandwidth costs.

I don't buy it.

A url shortener is relatively trivial to operate (at least, compared to some
of the stuff I'm doing right now). It works, or it doesn't, once you've got it
there isn't much you can do to make it better or add features.

So development costs are almost a one-time affair and it seems they had
already done that.

What's left is the bandwidth cost.

A Mbit is about $5 /month in bulk. The average 'GET' reguest from a device is
maybe 500 bytes, the answer, the redirect is maybe another 500 bytes. So say 1
Kbyte in total (generous!). 1Mbit / sec = 128 Kbyte, so that is roughly 100
requests / second for $5 /month. Serverload is trivial, a single table with a
unique key, you can do 1000's of queries like that per second on a single box.
It is a trivially parallel problem, simply distribute all urls across all
machines. A single box could push maybe 100K requests / second using varnishd
or some other front end cache (tr.im uses nginx), so that's maybe 800Kbit/sec
out of one box.

You'll need a bunch of IPs otherwise you'll run out of sockets and you'll need
some memory for the cache.

Calculate in some margin and you can cut that down to maybe 500 Mbit/sec, so
that box would cost you $2500 / month and it would handle a staggering
62500*86400 = 5 billion requests / day.

No way tr.im is at that level, more likely a few tens of millions of requests
per day, reduce bandwidth costs accordingly, say $500 to $1000.

It wouldn't take more than a bunch of google ads displayed to the makers of
the urls or a donation to keep a service like that going, that's not a whole
lot of $ to make on a site. One of my sites which converts absolutely horrible
does that kind of money on 27000 visitors / day (mostly from Finland, don't
ask...).

This will never be a business, and personally I really don't understand why
the likes of twitter do not give a short url out on their own service. But it
also does not cost a fortune to run, that's bs.

And if you want to create 'value' you should do something a little more sticky
than a url shortener, it literally is a throwaway relationship with your
audience.

And if you lock them out for a couple of days because you can't make up your
mind if you're going to sink or swim you have really tossed your investment
into the water.

------
Oompa
Not a PR stunt? Sure seems like one from my perspective.

~~~
scott_s
Not from mine.

They're one of many competitors in an eco-system that's relatively easy to
enter, other competitors have a significant advantage over them, and I have no
idea what their business model is. When they said they no longer wanted to
sink money into their project, I understood why.

I also understand that people often feel entitled to free services, would
complain when one goes away, and they might not have been prepared for that
kind of social pressure. I understand giving in to it.

~~~
Oompa
I understand that too, but most of the people I saw talking about tr.im were
saying "Go figure" not "Please stay". This on top of the asking bit.ly for
money rather than saying "Ok" to keep the links working, while complaining
about money issues.

It seems like this was a ploy to get people's attention for tr.im so they
could try to sell it.

~~~
jonknee
Why would they want to give their work to a company that cuddled up to Twitter
thanks to connections and took the entire market in a matter of months? I'd
want some money out of that too.

~~~
tcdent
I understood the bit.ly absorption to be more of a courtesy than an attempt to
profit. Giving their redirects to a company that has the infrastructure and
the long term support to keep them on-line, rather than just let them go dark,
would be responsible and really wouldn't help bit.ly increase it's user base
at all.

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Semiapies
"This was not a public-relations stunt. At all."

 _Please._

Why exactly should anyone have any trust in such a statement from people who
shut down their service with little or no advance warning, but could bring it
back up "indefinitely" after some "appeals"?

~~~
Kadin
They weren't shutting down their service; they were actually being very
responsible about it -- they were going to stop taking new URLs for
redirection, but continue to maintain the previously-created ones until the
end of the year.

It's not like they suddenly announced "we're pulling the plug, screw you all."
It seemed like a considered decision, made from a position where they could
afford to wind down the service over 6 months.

I think their decision to _not_ shut down may be frankly irresponsible. Their
reasons for closing seemed fair: bit.ly has a monopoly on URL-shortening due
to Twitter; there's really not a market for more than one or two URL-
shortening services; there's no clear way to monetize URL-shortening unless
you're the dominant player (and can sell stats); any sale to a third party
risked turning the service into something evil that they had ethical problems
with; keeping the service open would just burn money and effort better spent
on other things. All, to my mind, valid reasons for closing.

Deciding to reopen (or not close) because a bunch of people complained --
people who aren't going to solve any of those fundamental issues -- that seems
like the questionable decision.

They were doing the right thing, but seemingly got talked out of it. It
doesn't make sense.

~~~
Semiapies
1) Suddenly not taking new URLs _is_ a partial shutdown.

2) It _is_ a questionable decision that doesn't make much sense. One of the
few scenarios that seems remotely sensible is that this was an attempt to
attract attention, particularly from investors who might be interested in a
service with such an enthusiastic following that they'd "appeal" to the
company to keep it going.

3) If not investors, then buyers: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/trim-
cuts-off-bitlys-30...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/trim-cuts-off-
bitlys-301works-idea-wants-to-sell/)

------
figital
They could save space by letting me choose my own default URL shortener. I've
got my personal domain listed on my twitter page. Say my home page is
<http://example.com>. Just put something like <123456> into your tweet and
your client would interpret that as http:/example.com/12346.

Otherwise they are the new Microsoft. ;)

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thisduck
They keep listing bit.ly's monopoly by way of Twitter. But there is a better
solution to the whole URL shortening issue, how about Twitter assigned a fixed
length to URLs. So a url in your tweet is say 5 or 6 characters. And it always
converts to ">link" (that's 5 characters).

Done, the URL shortening destroying the internet problem is solved. We've had
URL shorteners forever, they've only become an issue because of Twitter.
Twitter should just do away with it all.

~~~
stingraycharles
Stop making sense!

The only solution would be for Twitter to acquire Bitly and their complex code
base, how else are the inflated prices going to be justified ?

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/30/if-bitly-is-
worth-8-mil...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/30/if-bitly-is-
worth-8-million-tinyurl-is-worth-at-least-46-million/)

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michael_dorfman
Since the tr.im saga has brought url shorteners to everybody's mind: anybody
have an idea for a winning business model? I can't seem to think of one...

~~~
imp
I like Awe.sm's approach. You own the domain and they do the URL shortening
and analytics for you. Costs $99/year. I haven't used it, but it seems like a
good way to make money in that area.

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/04/its-awesm-create-a-
powe...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/04/its-awesm-create-a-powerful-
custom-url-shortener-for-your-own-domain/)

~~~
thorax
This is also the the service we offer with TinyArrows:

<http://➡.ws/info/custom/>

For statistics, we provide info down to the IP address and user agent that
clicked on the link.

~~~
imp
Cool, checking it out now. Do you have to use the arrow for shortening? I
think it can be confusing.

~~~
thorax
We support lots of different short URLs for lots of different domains, the
arrow is just one of the fun ones. ( See <http://tinyarro.ws> )

The people who sign up for personalized domains can use whatever domain they
want and we'll help them track down a good tiny one if they need.

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tptacek
I'm really meant to believe that Twitter can be expected to foster an
_ecosystem_ of URL shorteners? Can I instead be pissed that Twitter hasn't
simply ended these efforts by not counting URL characters?

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adrinavarro
Traffic looks attractive, but it's a problem when you don't get any benefits
at all. By the way, I still don't see how is bit.ly going to stay alive.

But what if we had our own url shorteners? I could have my own shortener on my
own domain (twitter won't re-shorten it), so there wouldn't be any privacity
or volatility issues.

Anyway, we're still "lazy" people... so we have to live with it.

~~~
briansmith
Twitter won't re-shorten it _now_ , but that could change at any time. What if
Twitter wrote every URL to a bit.ly URL regardless of length? Would anybody
stop using Twitter because of it? I doubt it. If they can find a way to make
money w/ bit.ly then why wouldn't they?

------
there
darn.

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jasonlbaptiste
why is this site consistently relevant? It's a minority url shortener. If it
were bit.ly or tinyurl, id understand. Even then, it depends on the spin. Flag
button activated!

