

Tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service - tlrobinson
http://tr.im/

======
pj
And the house of cards begins its collapse.

Let's hope it crumbles fast and we can rid the web of these shorteners before
they cause more damage to the future of the internet.

~~~
ubernostrum
The argument against URL shorteners is specious, and taken to its logical
conclusion is an argument against anyone ever linking to anything: _any_ URL
might turn up gone in the future, and you have no way of knowing or predicting
which ones will last. Amazingly, the web's managed to survive this.

But if you're genuinely concerned that this poses some sort of threat to the
web, start an archiving service which preserves mappings of short -> long
URLs, or talk to the archive.org folks to see if they'd be interested.

~~~
PostOnce
That idea in the second paragraph of your comment is good. Someone ought to do
that.

As far as the first, though, I think that you've got it wrong. It's not the
same as any old site breaking. Say a person, over time, links to eight sites
in his forum comments, and one goes down. Seven links are still valid. If he
uses a shortener service that collapses, _none_ of his links are valid.

~~~
ubernostrum
Say a person links to a series of articles, and the site which hosted them
goes down. Now all the links are invalid, and this is nothing more than what
we deal with every day.

The alarmist rants I've seen against URL shorteners are simply making this
argument without realizing that there is no "new" problem in need of solving,
only an old one that we already handle fairly well. Though given the level of
irrational rhetoric I've been seeing in these discussions (example here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713998>) I'm not sure there's any point
trying to argue with it.

~~~
judofyr
The problem with URL shorteners is that you now have _two_ servers which can
go down.

~~~
tlrobinson
Not only that, but if it's an "original" URL that's broken but at least well
formatted you at least have a hint of where to look, for example in the Google
cache, archive.org, or elsewhere on the original domain.

Shortened URLs give you no hints as to where the original document was
located.

------
jbellis
<http://blog.tr.im/post/159369789/tr-im-r-i-p>

> this required significant development investment and server expansion to
> accommodate. tr.im has thousands and thousands of users, creating tens of
> thousands of URLs per day

10K urls per day x 1000 hits for statistics = 10M hits per day, each of which
is a read (duh) but also a write to keep a hit count. That's 120 reads + 120
writes per second.

Most of the distributed nosql options can easily handle that on a single node,
and the non-distributed ones generally have even higher one-node throughput.

Not to be an armchair architect, but url mapping is pretty simple. Sounds like
they were using a bad tool for the job if they were having to throw hardware
at it.

~~~
iheartmemcache
An avg of 240 dbIO/s is entirely different from peak time IO/s. When someone
like Jeff Atwood posts a link using their service, they could easily see 10x
the volume. Volume might be really stagnant for 45 minutes, then bam, 10
percent of their req's for the hour come in within a 2-3 minute span. Judging
by their blog-post, I'm assuming they needed to have the infrastructure to
handle that kinda load.

Either way, I modded you up for a pretty thorough analysis (and because I
largely agree with you (it basically is a mapped 301 Location:
<http://newsite/)>). From my armchair standpoint(1), a 256 mb slice + Redis +
nginx should be able to handle 10x the volume easy.

(1) Well not quite armchair, a good 30 percent of my firm's business is
directly related to scaling.

~~~
mahmud
_Well not quite armchair, a good 30 percent of my firm's business is directly
related to scaling._

Your user name didn't hint at that at all.

------
superjared
A large reason of why URL shorteners are hard to maintain is the incredible
amount of spam they receive. At Slicehost we seem to get spamcop emails every
day about yet another URL shortener someone has created because the spammers
will use their link instead of the real URL.

~~~
pg
Most url shorteners are banned on HN (in the sense that stories using them are
autokilled) for that reason.

~~~
ivankirigin
You could auto-lengthen the URLs. Twitter has a useful tool for this, e.g.
[http://search.twitter.com/hugeurl?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.c...](http://search.twitter.com/hugeurl?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2F5rw4zb)

~~~
trezor
Or you could simply not use stupid URL shorteners which have absolutely no
purpose anywhere on the internet.

That one website (twitter) has a post limit of 140 characters doesn't mean we
should spread the stupidity to everywhere else.

~~~
ivankirigin
I get a lot of value from bitly's analytics. Also, with their pushing clients
like AIR apps, iphone apps, and email readers to include referrers, your
site's analytics are going to get a lot better.

URL shortening done wrong sucks. Don't use anything besides those that are
really serious. Right now, bitly is the best option.

~~~
trezor
If you want analysis. why not use one of the numerous proven tools out there
already, designed for this specificly?

Not trolling. This is a serious question.

~~~
ivankirigin
What other tools can show you how a link spreads through a social network?
That's why it is valuable - it is like analytics that Twitter / facebook etc
have but don't expose

------
jorgeortiz85
Startups die for many reasons, but I can't help but feel the ones tr.im gives
are a little dishonest.

    
    
       There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening --
       users won't pay for it
    

Users won't pay for web search either, and that has monetized very well.

    
    
       We just can't justify further devleopment since Twitter
       has all but annointed [sic] bit.ly the market winner.
    

Umm, when tr.im got into this business, Twitter had "anointed" tinyurl the
"market winner". If it was worth it to compete against tinyurl regardless, why
isn't it worth it to compete against bit.ly?

~~~
minsight
"Users won't pay for web search either, and that has monetized very well."

Tell that to excite, altavista, yahoo, etc...

------
codyrobbins
Given that they're shutting down, why isn't Tr.im simply releasing a complete
copy of their URL mappings?

There's no need for some industry-wide URL shortener consortium to archive
links. Just give out your mappings if you happen to go out of business, so
someone could decode your URLs manually if they really needed to.

~~~
mbrubeck
There are sure to be some private (unpublished) URIs in there, some of which
may contain sensitive information. (Users _shouldn't_ submit such URIs to
third-party shorteners, but of course they do anyway.)

 _Edited to add:_ Of course, those would also be picked up by groups like
archiveteam.org that are brute-force crawling the shortener URI space.

------
dannyr
These Url shorteners became popular because of Twitter. Twitter should handle
links differently (e.g. not count Urls against the 140 char limit).

~~~
tlrobinson
Ironically bit.ly thinks tr.im is spam: <http://bit.ly/2JXXZ>

~~~
joshu
Most systems HAVE to mark shorteners as spam, given their use.

Can you think of reasonable and serious reason to shorten another shortener?

------
byrneseyeview
I wonder how easy it would be to create an archive.org equivalent for URL
shorteners. Any shortener could pay a fee (based on the number of links they
had) in order to join, in exchange for which they'd get some form of
certification that they were members. The archiving service would be a
nonprofit with publicly viewable finances, and would make copies of partial or
full link databases available for further download and backup.

If it caught on at all, it would do two things well: 1. it would mean that
there were few good reasons to use an un-certified link shortener, and 2. it
would make the transition to a post-shortener world much simpler and more
graceful: twitter could just download the full data set and repeal the
character limit for URLs.

~~~
tlrobinson
<http://permanize.org/>

~~~
codyrobbins
Yeah, but how is Permanize any different than a URL shortener itself — what
happens when Permanize goes out of business?

------
drawkbox
I think there is good behind short urls but they should all be same domain.
Relying on a third party for links embedded everywhere will now be worthless
for users of tr.im.

Short urls are good but also readable urls are better. The whole short url
thing stems from twitter and is being originally based on SMS. But it is
breaking the web when this happens and not knowing what you are clicking on is
a security problem.

I could see a case for a corporate service for short urls like
mycompany.tr.im/YHu8 or just mycompany.com/YHu8 etc. Then it redirects to a
longer url within the same company. But it needs to be guaranteed to be there
as long as the linked to endpoint exists.

------
callahad
In know that in the past TinyURL has adopted the domain and databases for
failed shorteners in the interest of preventing link rot. Maybe Tr.im should
toss an email to Gilby?

------
matt1
Any guesses on how much it costs to keep one of these running in terms of
money or effort?

~~~
soult
If you only want to do redirection, no statistics stuff, then pretty cheap. If
they don't want submission of new links, even cheaper, they could even run it
on shared hosting.

------
radley
This is a reference to "tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service,
effective immediately."

Please don't make up your own titles, especially when they don't match the
content.

------
YuriNiyazov
What is "a minor amount"? I'd buy it for $1000

~~~
telegraph
May I ask why? How does one monetize URL shortening, anyway?

~~~
mryall
I'd buy the domain name, but I suspect it will go for a lot more than $1000.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
If they were trying to sell the whole package, including the domain name,
which is required for the service to continue supporting all the existing
links, and no one would buy it even "for a token amount", then why would the
domain name alone go for more than that?

~~~
sachinag
Because the domain doesn't cost anything to maintain. The service has hosting
and bandwidth costs, which must be relatively substantial for a service of
their scale.

------
jasonkester
Business Opportunity:

\- Buy these guys out for whatever they ask

\- Repurpose the site as a Jenny Craig style weight-loss business (or pretty
much any other business that you like) on the site

\- Redirect all those useless tr.im links to your new tr.im homepage

Suddenly you have a business with 10M unique visitors every day. It's like
buying ALL the advertising, all at once. You now have 40 zillion inbound links
to your thing. If you can't make money from that somehow, there's something
seriously wrong.

So yeah, just do the big bait & switch. When the complaints roll in, 301 them
over to the old tr.im team. After all, it's them who sold you the domain, so
they should take the blame.

------
rythie
This could be damaging to Twitter since it will raise a lot questions about
the viability of short urls. It may force them to either buy bit.ly or start
their own service.

------
treitnauer
What about running an URL shortener on your own domain? Here are 10 tools to
do it: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752144>

------
jmonegro
Heck, Microsoft used tr.im

------
ajg1977
Rather than say that no one was interested for "token amounts" of money, I
wish they would put the service up on eBay or accept closed envelope bids.

I'm sure they would get something for it, I myself would be extremely if the
price was right.

That said there seems to be the same air of fatalism in both their attempts to
sell the service and the reasons for giving it up.

------
sammcd
I really think there is some room here for blogs and news sites to provide
their own short urls that people can use to link to them. They might be able
to reap the benefits of a higher page rank.

Another good side affect is that urls might get cleaned up a bit in hopes that
they will get copied straight into a tweet. I would love a web with short copy
and pastable urls.

------
rishi
How much to purchase your service?

------
SwellJoe
Interesting that one of the commenters is Dave Winer, and he seems to think
tr.im represents viable business opportunities.

------
joshu
Not surprised in the slightest...

------
ams1
hopefully bit.ly's api will expand to cover stuff you could do with tr.im,
like aggregate user statistics-- seen in dave winer's 40 twits app
(<http://dave.40twits.com/>)

------
jdr5
there must be enough content/news websites they could partner with. twitter is
not the only business out there

------
known
Doesn't URL shorteners break PageRank?

------
tnaleid
Here's a more appropriate link to the story: <http://tr.im/w7Ba>

------
acangiano
Apparently they can't afford a spellchecker either.

------
pkrumins
that's what you get when you use url shorteners - broken links to your
website.

------
trezor
It pretty much says it all when this company's* only hope of turning a profit
was getting someone to buy them. If your business plan is getting bought and
leaving someone else with the bill, you have no business plan.

(*) Not entirely sure I would consider a 20 line PHP script a company.

------
TweedHeads
Two things:

First, I don't like URL shorteners for this same reason. Every web server
should be in charge of managing long and short urls easily with just one line
of code.

Second, how expensive it is to keep the site running? $10 a month for a cheap
hosting service and they can make more than that with just google ads.

Now, if they want to live largely just by shortening urls then no, it won't
pay the bills.

~~~
larrywright
A couple of points:

1) Url shorteners aren't going away. Like it or not, there's a need,
particularly for things like Twitter.

2) I think it's more than that. They did more than just shorten urls, they
also tracked analytics on those links, clickthrough rates and the like. You
can view charts and graphs about how often links are clicked on, etc. Multiply
that by millions of links, and it's not an inconsequential amount of storage
and bandwidth. I think you way overestimate the capabilities of a $10 hosting
package.

~~~
jerf
All the $10 package would _have_ to do is forward the user, though. It
wouldn't have to do all that stuff.

That said, it probably isn't quite a $10 package. On the other hand, it
probably wouldn't take much, especially if you cared to take the time to write
a custom-purpose HTTP-redirection server.

Actually, that would sort of be an interesting programming challenge: How
small and efficient can you get such a server?

~~~
lamnk
_On the other hand, it probably wouldn't take much, especially if you cared to
take the time to write a custom-purpose HTTP-redirection server._

You must consider the opportunity cost. How long does it take to code such
custom server ? As tr.im is not profitable, its developers' time could be used
to produce other product/service that has a better business model and is more
profitable.

~~~
calcnerd256
they could ask the community to donate the code in the interest of maintaining
the links that depend upon it

