We don’t know what is going on over at Nambu, but it doesn’t smell good. Today, just days after shutting down Tr.im and saying all support would cease at the end of the year, killing all the links shortened with the service, they have reversed course. “Nambu will keep tr.im operating going forward, indefinitely, while we continue to consider our options in regards to tr.im’s future.”
The company cites the massive outpouring of pleas not to shut down the service as the reason behind the move. But here’s what we think is really going on. By shutting down the service and announcing that they would be completely dead in a few months, Nambu was ensuring that no one would use it. The problem with this is that they’re also trying to sell Tr.im, for between $80,000 and $100,000, we’ve heard from multiple sources. But everyone is balking at those prices. And with a non-working service, Nambu had absolutely no leverage.
So, the service is back and will operate “indefinitely” which is code for “until we can offload the site.” As they say in point number four on their blog post, “This was not a public-relations stunt. At all.” Sure, but it was an awful business decision — one that had to be reversed for any hope of a reasonable sale for them.
In their post today, they also make it very clear that they still blame Twitter for showing favoritism (Twitter uses Bit.ly as its default shortener), which led to the rash decision to shut off the service. We’ve also heard they were considering doing the same thing to their Twitter client over the same issue.
Nambu also notes that it won’t just offload the site to anyone:
We too want to see tr.im live on, but feel we can only transition it to another party committed to ensuring the links are not highjacked in any way. A contract for sale to an unknown group or individual simply cannot guarantee that.
This somewhat explains the multiple emails we’ve gotten from interested parties saying that Nambu is simply not responding to their inquiries about the sale. But a lot of these parties are reputable, so I’m not entirely sure what is going on over at Nambu. Perhaps they just didn’t want to engage some of these offers until the service was back on, and they had some leverage.
[photo: flickr/striatic]
as I said, they did it for attention
I doubt it. It looks like they were frustrated with the business and made decision without thinking it all the way through. The attention they got isn’t good. It’s already a leap of faith to use a middle man to serve your links. Hard to imagine a user would trust tr.im after this.
HAHAHAHAH, idiots.
seriously. wtf.
Yea, they seemed very bitter in their blog post. I think it was a rash decision that they now regret. Too bad it has probably hurt any chance of anyone buying that service, or trusting in their ability to properly manage and monetize other similar services.
I think their core problem is trying to sell a pureplay url shortener, there’s no money in that. The value isn’t in shortening, that’s just a feature of a larger platform.
I think they will survive, but they will have to be inventive and come up with something that makes thier service different.
It was a mistake but they can recover.
Are those scissors or the peace sign?? I love how the destruction of links are just casual conversation.. GFO!
Nice publicity stunt tr.im.
http://tr.im/wdBE
Sorry.. couldn’t help it.
Some good points! I would also agree with the reasoning here. Interested buyers want to see a working product. A product with traction. A product with potential. If you haven’t been using the service and it has been totally shut off (creating a mass exodus of its users INCLUDING its top evangelists,) then you will not know anything about its value and potential return. This was a “Doh” moment for Nambu.
perhaps, but it wouldn’t take too long to burn $80k..
Why doesn’t twitter get slammed for having a closed system. Seems like people should be able to use any shortner
you can…
Agreed!
You can choose in various Twitter clients, but when using Twitter via the web their is no place in settings to change which shortener you use and your stuck with bit.ly.
That is definitely not fair and hinders what could be a flourishing market, as you see the data will be used to build a digg competitor via bit.ly. There is a lot more that can be done with these things besides just shortening.
The fact that bit.ly is used if you post a long link doesn’t mean that you can’t post links via any url shortener if you shorten them yourself. The people that have now flocked to Twitter and mostly use the web interface don’t care (or perhaps even know) what a URL shortener is.
Get the tr.im (or tinyurl, or whatever) Twitter bookmarklet and post with that shortener. Twitter had to choose a service to replace tinyurl with and bit.ly was well funded enough to survive.
agreed.
I’m actually all for taking business “personally.” I take Bloom very, very personally. There’s no way to avoid it when you love something or are passionate about something.
But you don’t make business *decisions* personally, and that’s exactly what’s happened here. If you read the blog posts, it sounds almost like they’re “mad” at Twitter for their “favoritism.”
Like they shut down their entire business to say, “Take that, Twitter! How do you feel now?! You put us out of business!”
Of course, Twitter has every right to pick a service and go with it. Twitter, nor bit.ly, care at all that this competitor has blown up. They pissed, moaned, and whined — and they made a very poor decision.
I’m not really judging their decision to shut down. The poor decision they made was how to handle their exit, particularly if they were interested in selling.
It seems to me, not only did they not have a plan for staying in business, they couldn’t even figure out a plan to go OUT of business!
I’m also dying to know how much their traffic or shortens have scaled back since this move.
I hope they have a plan for going back into business. Will this be the first case of a company learning more from stopping than they ever did from starting?
“The company cites…”
Yeah right, the company! There is most likely a kid running the show and ya’all being taken for a ride with all these insignificant services (read clutter) on the web.
These posts are killing nambu.com’s servers, there site is down right now.
80,000 – 100,000 seems incredibly dirt cheap for any company brand recognition and a couple of posts on TechCrunch
For real, though.
And making rash a decision like terminating the service because they feel betrayed by Twitter seems really unstable, juvenile – like me an a relationship.
People used url shorteners before twitter. TinyURL was the default shortener before bit.ly. The reasons to shut down in the first place were silly. Odd business tactics. Oh well.
seem like a pr stunt from the beginning . pretty smart move i never heard of them before this
Hey tr.im users, export the data from your last 100 links with this script created by Mike Soh and say buh-bye to their antics: http://www.mikesoh.com/trim/
give those guys a break. wouldn’t you do whatever you could to make things work? Big deal if they want to sell. The domain is worth at least a chunk of the 100K. Twitter should buy them or they should give users a choice who to use. TC is turning into valleywag.
“Unknown” seems to refer to people that Nambu doesn’t know rather than people who don’t have reputations.
When in doubt, put up a “site down” page on your site and you then get covered by TechCrunch, get a lot of traffic and free publicity, and then you relaunch and sell your company for a bunch of money.
Great business plan.
Darn, for the last and final time, I’m ponying up $5,000 for the service. Going once…
While I loved the tr.im service, with this stunt, I realized I need a reliable service that will be around for the long term…. and now I’ve lost confidence about their future.
I think i’ll now stick with bit.ly.
well I was an avid user of tr.im but even though the service is back up I’m keeping well clear for awhile. 3.ly for me now though feel drawn to x.vu as well.
They punked the whole blogosphere and everyone fell for their antics. LOL
ok seriously Tr.im needs to stop blaiming Twitter for its lack of growth. Before Twitter these url shorten-ers existed just fine right?
If Tr.im whole existance is based off of what Twitter does or doesn’t do then maybe they should just shut it down.
Focus on making a better product and pushing what differential advantage you url shorten-er has over Bit.ly and Tiny Url and others.
Twitter isn’t the only game in town either. Its the biggest but it doesn’t have to stay that way. but if thier whole business plan is to be the default url shorten -er for Twitter then maybe they are in the wrong business
it’s not about being the default one. It’s about giving Twitter users a choice.
Twitter users should be able to use whatever URL shortener they want. It’s really not difficult to implement this.
Should Yahoo be mad at Firefox for making Google the default search?
Boo-hoo.
so what you are saying is that Tr.im whole business plan… ney its SURVIVAL depends on what another business url shortener is?
I agree with the article 100%. This is smelly if you ask me.
Heh. http://tr.im/weBN
I will agree that Twitter should give users a choice (that would be a nice feature) but Tr.im STILL needs a better business plan than depending on Twitter.
Can someone please help me?
“This is a basic reality of challenging monopolies. bit.ly has deep personal connections and agreements with Twitter that we simply cannot compete with. And it is our humble opinion that this type of favoritism will become an issue for all Twitter developers.”
Sorry, but why on earth should Twitter offer choice? If I wanted to shorten a URL and post it on Twitter, and Twitter asked me, “Would you prefer to shorten with bit.ly or tr.im?” I would say, WHO CARES???
Maybe I’m missing something important, but does anyone here prefer one URL shorten service over another enough to demand choice?
I prefer http://idek.net because it’s awesome! Stats are great, user-friendly and @covati (who made it) is a cool guy.
$80k seems like a low enough price for someone to take over and maybe try to spin the technology.
Why doesn’t tech crunch buy it for $20k, make it into a social media business link network that can take on Digg from more business minded people, in the web/tech world? You can be your own leading media source.
If they release the short url program and run it like WordPress…..
Cry me a river. You don’t see TinyURL posting blogs whining about how Twitter isn’t be fair. Boo-hoo, grow a pair!
Maybe Twitter just selected bit.ly because they realise they don’t play silly games. In all honesty who would trust tr.im going forward if their business decisions are so poorly made?
I think tr.im should have good business plan to survive as there are too many competition
While $80-100K sounds “cheap” to some, it’s only cheap if you’ve got it and can spend it. Plus, there are no details about how much it costs to run the site.
I think the main problem is that the only thing this company has going for them is the brand recognition which is of no use without some way to pay for the costs to operate it.
As a regular tr.im user, all of the drama surrounding this situation has been unsettling. While everyone is focused on the impetuous nature of shutting down the business, they do claim to have sought a buyer before reaching that conclusion and they also did offer to run the service for existing URLs through 12/2009, so it wasn’t a cut and run situation. The reversal of their decision does seem to make the most business sense notwithstanding their run rate, but I am grateful for the opportunity to back up my tr.im URLs and stats. Regrettably, I think a lot of tr.im users will be using this opportunity to backup and then move on to bit.ly which is also a fine service. Given the degree to which the use of free services have penetrated our daily lives, I suppose we should be grateful that these kinds of disruptions don’t happen more often.