For all the angst around the demise of Tr.im, the fact is that there are way too many URL shortening services in the world and inevitably more will fall by the wayside. There simply is no need for more than a dozen services to make long URLs shorter (and that doesn’t even count services such as Su.pr or the Diggbar which incorporate a URL shortener as a feature).
Already, the market is consolidating around bit.ly, largely thanks to it being the official URL shortener adopted by Twitter (which switched from competitor TinyURL back in May). Currently, bit.ly makes up 79.6 percent of the short URLs on Twitter, according to stats kept by Tweetmeme. It is followed by TinyURL (with 13.75 percent), is.gd (2.47 percent), ow.ly (2.26 percent), and FriendFeed’s ff.im (1.92 percent).
On Friday, before it shut down, Tr.im was no. 4 on the list, even with ow.ly. So when I say that Tr.im is not going to be missed I do not mean that it was not loved by some users. It was even moderately popular. But as you can see from the market shares above, it is hard to compete against bit.ly since it is Twitter’s default URL shortener. Twitter should just buy it already and put all the other ones out of their misery. Until it does that, it is in Twitter’s interest to keep a few alternatives in the wings. If it ever chose to switch to another default service, that one would grow to 70 to 80 percent of all short links within a few months as well.
In other words, if bit.ly ever slips on the innovation front, it can easily be replaced. But bit.ly is more than a URL shortening service. All of those links hold valuable data. Collecting that data plays into its grander plans to show users deep analytics and the most popular links being shared at any given time. Tr.im didn’t have any such plans. It was an afterthought of Nambu, whose main focus is to make a killer stream reader. If making URLs short (and mining the resulting data) is not your main business, it is hard to compete against startups who do nothing else.
Many developers and others find Twitter’s favoritism maddening, but that is how standards are created (right or wrong). As for Tr.im users who are afraid they will lose their data or that all of their short links will be broken, bit.ly has offered to create a short-link redirecting archive at 301works. Nambu should take them up on the offer (but it won’t right now because it wants to sell tr.im and that data is valuable).
What happens to those links is really what we should be worried about. Broken links mess up the Web. All URL shortening services should make a directory of all of their short links available where anyone (especially search engines) can look up the underlying long link where each one redirects. Maybe this is 301works or some other non-profit repository, but having all of these non-standard short links proliferate will just create more problems down the road when other URL shorteners inevitably fail. And fail they will, which is another reason for publishers to use their own custom URL shortener (we use Awe.sm) and always control their data.
Good Article!
There are way too many of every kind of service in the world.
HollyM
http://www.thessayist.com
Do you make stupid comments to spam your URL?
why do you seem to have problems with it? stop being a troll already!
Okay Holly McBain.
I disagree, is there a service that allows people to punch spammers who make lame comments ?
Whoa! Whats the use of such a hue and cry if it doesnt even have even 1% market share
Check Compete, it was going to do nearly a million hits this month. That is a major disruption.
The hue and cry is because what’ll happen to other URL shortener’s if they don’t have a solid business model themselves
No one can run a website forever can they? Do correct me if I’m wrong.
U know that spamming your link does not work because it has a nofolow tag on it ?
And I agree that it sucks that there are now more and more dead links whit this service down. So people if u are on a web page just learn HTML to make the URL short.
This is just for testing….
Why even bother with persistence? Most shortened URLs are “in the moment” references that are contextual to a real-time discussion and then forgotten?
Last time I checked, Twitter’s own timeline search doesn’t last a few weeks.
well it makes sense now why they are going out. I didn’t realize that they were so low on the market share. Though, you would think that they would have approached another service provider to sell the goodwill of the company and not just walk away….at least it sounds like it happened that way, and bit.ly coming in at the end.
Less is more. Let the numbers do the talking. Bit and TinyUrl seems like enough. Also they were first movers and it is not as easy to catch up to first movers. Finished, I need to keep this short.
Let the best tool survive !!
How do these URL shorteners make money?
They don’t, and they won’t, which is why most of them will inevitably fail.
Most of them will fail, and that is why they may be bad for the structure, reliability of the web. However, http://aafter.com creates two fail safe URLs once you input long URL in the search box.
The same way Twitter makes money.
…
@dave – good one
In theory by mining their huge amounts of valuable data on internet traffic and selling it to various interested parties — in theory.
Except everyone has that data already, they don’t have to pay for it to get it. That’s how sites like Tweetmeme work, they just scrape the Twitter stream and can tell you how many people are tweeting each link, and can spider the links to grab the click stats even. The average Bit.ly link I publish gets around 100 bot hits before it dies.
This is not surprising more sites might shut down going forward I dont know why so many sites of the same time kept on coming every day doing the same thing i.e making the url short
we created http://pie.im to help take tr.im place! Even comes with a bookmarklet
Oh my god, thank you what would we all do without another URL shortening service.
No thanks.
I’m not familiar with the features of tr.im beyond actual shortening (e.g. stats, etc), but from reading the comments on their blog, many people thought they were the best service. I’d be curious as to why.
But anyways… I agree that there are just way too many of these services, and since there is money in this business, most of them will eventually shut down. This will break many links, yes… however, as someone else said, many of these shortened links are “in the moment” things shared on Twitter. Most of them probably get 99% of their clicks within the first 24 hours of being created, so I don’t think it will really be an issue.
However, there are some people who, for some insane reason, use bit.ly or other shortened links in their email signature, or on their actual site. This is just incredibly dumb behavior. First, these URL’s don’t need to be shortened – there’s plenty of space, and it’s typically useful to know the real URL you will end up on if space is not an issue. Second, they are putting their dependence on this third party service that could shut down at any moment. Bit.ly is probably ok, being that Twitter will likely buy them and if not, they are still backed by a very well funded company. But any other shortener could disappear like this any day. Don’t rely on them for anything other than Twitter, or you’re asking to get bitten in the ass.
they use it for tracking links.
Correction…
…since there is *NO* money in this business…
Wouldn’t it make sense for bit.ly or one of the others to buy the domain & short link database from tr.im?
Presumably they could integrate it with their existing infrastructure without too much trouble.
When it comes to using short urls I tend to use lesser known services like http://phaze.me because I dont want my links to look like a shortened url (some people don’t like clicking blind links). That’s just me though. I don’t care how these sites make money, and my links only need to be functional for a month or two.
Or, here’s a crazy thought: maybe Twitter should remove the 140 character restriction so links can once again be transparent? Or at least don’t count http strings against the 140 count.
The limit only serves to make Twitter more arcane and less approachable to newbies, and transparent links would do us all good to curb Twitter spam.
And the SMS specification should be re-written to allow unlimited characters. Everybody should buy a new phone.
@ezra, let’s be honest — how many people actually use twitter over sms? nobody i know.
of those that do, most i would bet have a phone capable of spanning longer messages across multiple messages. and if not, then i’d say, yeah, upgrade your phone to use twitter for the greater good of the system.
Yeah, the SMS integration with twitter really seems to be holding the company back — I really wonder what the stats on how many users actually use the SMS feature.
yep or just change every url with “[link]” what good is a url in an sms-only phone
oh c’mon erick, your advice is rubbish.
all url shorteners should die. it’s a limitation imposed by sms that is just so backwards-looking. and SMS doesn’t even have the 140 chars limit, every phone i ‘ve used was able to recombine smss that were split in multiple messages. what good is sending a url to a phone that cannot do that anyway, since you need a browser to view the link. short urls are a plague that should be getting obsolete already.
die shorturls, die SMS
These are URL shortening services. The primary goal is to shorten the URL. Trim was better at that than bit.ly by 2 characters. TR.IM FTW!
TR.IM WILL LIVE FOREVER IN MY HEART!
you might wanna check your math there.
I wrote a sumup of the available URL Shorteners which includes around 120 entries plus a couple of deadpooled services. so if someone wants to know what services are out there, have a look:
http://hjacob.c...ener-redirects/
X Option 1: Creating a public archive of short URLs will not work – what happens when the archive goes down for good. Or, if the process is completely open, with a RESTful API for archival, how do you fight SPAM.
X Option 2: Creating your-own-domain shortener – well, this just distributes the problem to larger number of domains but hardly solves it. Additionally, there will be a need for creating a short-url icon (the equivalent of the familiar orange RSS icon) peppering all your pages. Well, looks exciting but do we really need more of such icons.
_/ OPTION 3: Create an open-spec algorithm for generating a two-way digest of a URL and have all the services adopt them. Well, ideally the initiative should be driven by the services themselves. After all, there is no security concern in encrypting and decrypting a public URL. With this, given any tr.im, or ungod.ly url, anyone can de-digest the short url. So even when a given service fades into the sunset, all its URLs can still be de-digested. Also, this completely does away with the needless traffic of re-direction. All digest links can be de-digested by the referee itself. Already a lot of open libraries are available for url-shortening but majority of them need tweaking, are not industrial-strength and would not scale beyond a trillion urls.
la.me si.tes mu.st d.ie
I had never heard of tr.im and, not to be rude, but I’m guessing I’m not alone when I say that.
Anyone depending on shortened URLs for anything important is crazy anyway.
Twitter can use whatever service it wants, all users need is a simple way to share links within confined messages. We don’t (and shouldn’t need to) care who provides the short links.
You’re absolutely right at the end of your article. People are only able to fully control what’s happening with their links if they own the domain name and run their own URL shortener on it. Anybody who’s considering Twitter as an important part of their business or personal brand should start thinking about customising their short URLs now. We’ve compiled a list of 10 tools, hosted and self-hosted, for running an URL shortener on your own domain:
http://iwantmyn...stom-domain.htm
I love the url shorting services. I use in my twitter account mostly the service of bit.ly, its fast and great.
hey, have you seen this ? jk.as/75r41ggr
can you guess what’s behind this ugly link ?
Aren’t you misinterpreting the “market share” a little here. Doesn’t Twitter use bit.ly as a default choice to automatically shorten URLs? So all URLs that are not shortened by the user automatically fall into the bit.ly basket. These numbers also applies to Twitter only – digg doesn’t even allow using bit.ly shortened URLs so the definition of the market share is a little wrong here.
Anyway, bit.ly is great. Glad to see them doing well! I think most of the people bitching about the URL shortening services have never tried out the cool statistics you get from bit.ly. With the statistics, it makes more sense to share a shortened link than a long link even if there was no message length restriction…
This whole bit of news occurs in a tiny microcosm of nothing-important. These short URL services are only needed for Twitter; where you can write more than 140 characters, you should not be using temporal, redirected links. It harms the very fabric of the web, and serves no purpose. In a full webpage, you can track link clicks without redirecting through an outside service.
Totally agree
totally agree too.
url shorteners are killing ergonomy. it’s like “kinder surprise” links and my whole twitter messages are only describing of where the f*cking bit.ly redirect.
thank you twitter.
Do you think Facebook should disallow shortened URLs, since they don’t have the 140 char limit?
i use cut.tw alot, its OK
I just started using the shortening URL on RevTweet. I was not even aware there were others till I noticed Twitter is Bit.ly Still those are the only ones Ive seen. I think more than 50 choices is overkill.
It seems like URL shortening should eventually be achieved at the browser level, via some sort of plugin. A quick search for “URL Shortener in browser” shows a few discussions, but I don’t see any specific existing plugin. I’d think that if Firefox / IE / Chrome created browser-based URL shorteners it’d be game over for all these other guys. Not to mention the cool stuff that Chrome could enable w/ integration b/w a native Chrome URL shortener & Google Analytics. This is probably already going on and I’m just the last to know.
Tr.im had interesting reasoning for going out of business. Personally I think that URL shorners are useful, but only in some cases. There are too many public ones, which is nice, but it can create confusions and , like in this case, uncertainty for uses who have relied heavily on the service.
I see more value in such services when they are build into/ part of a website whose business is not URL shortening. Some examples are the NY Times, Stumble Upon, or TechCrunch’s tcrn.ch.
http://thetitan...-there-so-many/