
URL shortener Tr.im gets cut off - jacquesm
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10306202-36.html
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greyman
I must say that I don't very much like the attitude of "we didn't figure out
how to monetize and nobody wants to buy us, so we just shutdown". For another
type of business it might not be such a problem, but for URL shortener, which
creates "ten thousands" links per day, it will just create a link rot and is
not responsible towards the Internet.

I hope the future URL shorteners will think twice whether it is clever to even
start it.

~~~
mtkd
This does worry me about the integrity of services like Twitter in the long
term.

You could be in a position 10 years from now going through your old Twitter
feed for something and it is completely unusable beyond a certain date due to
Tinyurl or Bitly having closed down.

Maybe an opportunity for some startup to begin spidering and recording all
shortened URLs into some big historical index.

It would be a goldmine if one of the big ones ever closed down.

~~~
jacquesm
I think if you come across something that you like on services like twitter or
fb that if you want to have access to it ten years from now you'd better
archive the whole thing.

Hardly any webpage lives that long, in spite of the 'urls should never die'
recommendation. In practice urls live a couple of years at best, go find all
those good things you found on geocities or myspace a couple of years ago...

The web is like any society, things have a life-cycle, links have one (where
the content gets moved or the short url dies), pages have one, and websites
have one too.

Routinely universities wipe the 'students' directory when the new year starts,
companies will remove entire product lines from their websites (including all
the documentation) when their support for the product ends. The web is very
much 'current affairs', preservation of the past is not the biggest priority.
Archive.org tries to combat this but it's a losing battle, they can't buy
drives fast enough to keep up.

Bookmark collections need periodic maintenance because of this anyway.

Worst case there is always your printer. And storage is cheap, for the little
bit of content that you come across that you really wish to preserve. A USH
stick will hold a surprisiingly large amount of webpages.

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jasonkester
"One commenter on the Tr.im blog post suggested that perhaps the service could
live on in the form of an open-source project"

That was my favorite bit of the article, ignoring the fact that URL Shorteners
are all essentially open source already. (There are technologies that can put
up a working version with a dozen lines of code.)

The humorous part was the assumption that "open source" is this magic concept
that can fix _anything_. Got a service with crippling server and bandwith
costs? Open source it so that... um... you can run it on the open source
servers? Do they have those?

~~~
ovi256
And on open-source electricity and bandwidth! And open-source sysadmins. This
is how software meets the Real World, where finite resources are finite.

I think what is actually meant is a volunteer community service. People could
donate time, money or servers towards running the service. Tr.im seems like a
good candidate, as it's an unfortunately critical service that simply holds
your links hostage.

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treitnauer
Also see 10 Tools to run an URL Shortener on your own Domain:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752144>

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zaius
I wonder how much they'd sell it for. It seems a waste to just shut it down.

~~~
woodsier
The blog stated something along the lines that they couldn't sell it, because
there was no apparent way to monetize it.

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jeroen
An earlier thread on this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=751415>

