Oh, this is rich. The Nambu Network, owners of the URL-shortening service Tr.im announced today that the service will go open source on or before September 15 of this year. That’s odd since the service has now gone from completely shutting down, to trying hard to sell, to bringing the service back up so it can sell, to now going open source in just 8 days.
Let me be clear, going open source is a great idea, I’m not sure if it will help Tr.im all that much, but on paper it sounds great. That’s what they should have done originally. But in a post today on Tr.im’s blog the service first apologizes for this whole fiasco, and then attempts to place blame elsewhere. As I read it, it’s either Bit.ly’s fault for making a low-ball offer to buy the Tr.im, Twitter’s fault for picking Bit.ly over Tr.im as its URL shortener of choice, 301works.org’s fault for being a “public relations stunt”, and yes, even TechCrunch’s fault because we “simply repeat vertbatim what twitter/bit.ly feeds [us]“.
Let me again be clear: We received no shortage of tips from very good sources last week about what Tr.im was doing behind the scenes while all of this played out. Not one of those tips was from either Bit.ly or Twitter or anyone directly related to them. Instead, they came from third-parties who were actively or passively pursuing a Tr.im acquisition. For example, we heard the $80,000 to $100,000 figure Nambu wanted for Tr.im from no less than three sources. And even more sources came forward to say they had heard that general price range as well and thought it was unreasonable, especially considering how Nambu handled the Tr.im situation, losing user trust in the process. So is it really any surprise today that they announce they’re going open source?
Does it suck that Twitter’s choice of Bit.ly made it hard for services like Tr.im to operate? Sure. But plenty of others are still out there doing it rather than descending into conspiracy theories. And it’s just poor form to drag other services into this mess, like Gnip, which is trying to do a good thing with 301works.org. Yes, it was Bit.ly’s idea, but Gnip is now handling it as a independant third-party, and no shortage of other URL shortening services have joined on. Obviously, some of those services probably don’t like that Twitter chose Bit.ly, but they deal with it and realize that a movement like this is worth teaming up with rivals for the good of all of them.
“It saddens me that this is how Tr.im is portraying 301works,” Gnip’s Eric Marcoullier told us today. He went on to reiterate that Gnip is simply serving as an independant third party for the project, attempting to do something good and useful. And while a ReadWriteWeb article on the matter today seemed to suggest that Tr.im was working actively with Gnip for this new crowd-sourced Tr.im, Marcoullier notes that anyone is free to push data through Gnip, but that he hasn’t specifically talked to Nambu about how Tr.im will use it. He also notes that since Tr.im will now be open source, he hopes the community behind it makes its data a part of 301works.
We have reached out to Tr.im to try and clear up their misplaced anger about this, but have yet to hear back. If we do, we will update.
I thought the shutdown post said the primary reason was tr.im’s operating costs.
That’s only going to go UP, not down, if they add an API on top of it and encourage people to help them to 10% market share as they are asking.
So now the guy is OK with funding the site out of pocket, but wasn’t last week?
Well, maybe after all the publicity surrounding it’s shutdown, suddenly it seems more viable? Like they say in showbiz, there is no such thing as bad publicity. We’ll see if they can spin this around though. A sinking ship is still a sinking ship unless they plug the holes.
September 15th is 8 days after August 17th… Wow, I guess a new calendar has taken over the Internet…
no, that would be 8 days since this started.
I don’t want to sound like a “smart-ass”, but wouldn’t this be more clear: “to now going open source all in just 8 days.”? (That is, adding the “all”.)
I doubt tr.im was serious about selling because they didn’t respond to my posts or email – as I’m sure they didn’t respond to other people who probably emailed them they were interested.
we heard quite a few similar stories.
but is it true that you haven’t spoken to tr.im all this time reporting the issue (as they state in their blog post)?
I simply received way too many inquiries to possibly process them properly with any due diligence. Too many people wanted to hijack the links to proceed on an ad hoc basis. And contrary to this absurd article I could have easily sold tr.im.
If you say so…
Seems reasonable to me. Every domain squatter and web marketer with half a brain probably saw dollar signs flash in his eyes at the prospect of hijacking the urls.
If you don’t care about all the teeny-bopper bickering, then click the last link in the article to read real news about what tr.im is planning. For example, you’d learn that Eric Woodward is funding the operations of the new tr.im personally.
“We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential”
We included Eric; why is he now willing to personally fund what he said was too expensive for the entire company to fund?
Simple… because of all this recent publicity, he’s going to try to re-position it for another sale.
He must think if there’s this much buzz about the service, it will increase the asking price for it.
Lame, dude. You’re just spouting off your half-witted guesses.
Because Nambu != Eric Woodward. I will cover costs where Nambu as a company was not willing to.
I’ve read “it’s open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available from now on, in real time.” Doesn’t that put some pressures on competitors who might not want to compete with such an animal? Maybe a strategy to get the purchase price up.
How do you sell something if you’ve turned the domain name over to a non-profit?
Damn you! There must be a conspiracy theory here somewhere…
I read it as they propose to go open source and hand it over to a nonprofit. If so, they can change their mind (again) if someone ups the offer.
You folks trying to monetize what should be an HTTP protocol amendment shouldn’t be surprised. It’s pretty silly to web 2.0 your way into a solution for a fundamental DNS issue.
Think about it.. you gots a CNAME and a TNAME (trimmed name). Oh wait, I forgot, that won’t allow anyone in their mom’s bedroom to accumulate traffic data from everyone else on the net.
The whole url shortener craze is ridiculous, ok? Its one facet of a hyped up social binge. If shorter urls were really that great, a website should go completely to short urls. So stupid.
There are conflicting issues here. Long urls serve the sites they reside on well with lots of SEO-friendly keywords.
Long urls do not work well on twitter which has a 160 character limitation based on an archaic messaging system known as SMS. I don’t blame twitter for going this route, I’m just trying to explain why both short and long URLs make sense.
I haven’t checked but hopefully these trimmers do 301 redirect to respect the SEO efforts made by the sites they are sending traffic to.
MGS, I see you have decided to crowdsource your spell check/proof read tasks: Yes, it was Bit.ly’s idea, but Gnip is now handling it as a independant (independent) third-party, and no shortage of other URL shortening services have joined on (..and there is no shortage of other URL shortening services willing to join).
I’m always happy to see more code become available, but frankly it won’t be anything valuable.
All these URL shortening companies do is a simple lookup-then-redirect. Any engineer worth half their salt can build (and with a server engineer, scale) one of these services in a matter of weeks at worst.
The difficulties come from compiling and maintaining statistics in real-time for millions clicks per day. Obviously the redirection code is simple, but the overall service in high volume is not so.
You are right about the complexity if you looked at from the perspective of tr.im, but the point is that the technical barrier to entry for the CNN’s of the world is so low, it makes the whole shortener business model fold like a house of cards. Shortened URL’s will be as pervasive as RSS feeds are today, and will be owned by the content owners.
And it makes much more sense for the content provider to start out providing both a long and a short url to their content in the first place. The content location can then be much easier to relocate if necessary, and if content is deleted it can be routed to site specific search for similar content.
The idea is simple. The need is widespread. There is basically no market for a global provider, and what we will see is that it falls to individual sites to handle it.
Can’t wait to see those 3 lines of code hit the scene!
Shortening URL service going open source? April’s fool? Can’t wait to see their 10 lines php code.
I would not pay 100,000 dollars for this service. Plus I would not then to much seeing how indecisive they are.
I think we’re all tired of the finger pointing, blame shifting and indecisiveness. Other websites have found ways to monetize their services and the websites themselves. What’s the deal? Tr.im is for sale, the owner gets some offers he finds insulting and then says ’screw everyone’ and shuts it down? If that’s how it went down then, yeah, I’d say that would generate bad buzz.
It sounds to me like they’re trying to reposition themselves and bury the bad buzz with what they think is good buzz so that someone might be willing to purchase Tr.im again.
Although I guess I’m not one to talk. I don’t use any of the URL shortener services because I have my own, which required a few hours of my own time to assemble and uses some open source PHP code that was provided by a fellow developer. Open source is a good thing, huh?
So you say “no finger pointing”, and then you let the crap fly? I see your game…
Maybe Erik chose the route that would provide the best outcome for its customers, instead of trying to scrounge up any cash he could? The fact that Erik is going to pony up the cash says a lot.
Anyhow, why does TC keep getting into public battles with people? Its not consistent with how they also attempt to play with mainstream media.
The finger pointing was in regard to Tr.im trying to move the blame around on others.
And why wasn’t he going to pony up the cash from the beginning? It went from just being shutdown out of the blue with a message that went into short detail about trying to sell the website (something that probably should have been left out of a front page message letting people know the site was down), to all of a sudden being open source in 8 days and funded by the owner.
I guess it’s better late than never, right? Just saying. I’m all for open source but something like this probably would’ve done well as open source from the starting gate. It probably would have flowered like a lot of others have done. It’s like anything else you try to sell. Just because it has some sort of value to you, doesn’t mean it holds the same value to others. Don’t get insulted because you received some offers you thought were low and then just shut down. Obviously that’s going to generate bad buzz and leave a bad taste in peoples mouths.
Maybe second thoughts? It happens, especially when you listen to your customers.
Second thoughts is fine but in the meantime they shouldn’t be blaming the whole thing on bit.ly or whoever else. That’s business. Some companies fail, while others succeed. I’m sure it’s a lesson learned and when the dust settles, tr.im will come back around and people will be happy again.
I’m just excited to put my Hands on that code…
, just wonder how they can’t monetize this, this is what happens when people look only in one direction….:-D code code code code
They do have a point on Techcrunch. This blog has always been a cheerleader for companies/products they like, be it Twitter, bit.ly, the iPhone, Gmail etc.
If the service or product is good, anyone is going to be an advocate for it. Of course going overboard and blowing off other opposing products is pretty unfair, but I don’t read enough on TechCrunch to make the call.
Wow, this story is boring as hell.
Maybe tr.im should have actually replied to the emails from interested buyers. We contacted them AFTER we knew the asking price, and they simply didn’t respond.
What is there to open source? Url shorteners are trivial to implement, and the world is not greatly enriched by another 3 lines of Ruby on Rails code.
To run a URL shorting service is not rocket science but rather a simple script. This is not a big deal. Instead of imitating other url shorteners come up with something different.
I’ve had this discussion several times on Twitter in the past few days… I get it that they are upset their business didn’t make it – it sucks. But, they are so focused on blaming bit.ly (calling them a monopoly – the “walled garden”- give me a break!) Bit.ly competed & won because they had the relationship, better biz dev activities, better product or just better luck. It hurts but suck it up and move on. The most recent post just carries it further – expanding their view of “the world is against us” paranoia… You are looking like fools to everyone in the industry!
independant –> independent
Paragraph 5.
Hi everyone,
I don’t like what trim is doing and I don’t approve, but I dislike 301works.org much more.. It was created by the same guys that are backing up twitter and bit.ly , without been a conspiracy guy I can see that’s a move from bit.ly to kill definitely the competitors.
It would make much more sense to create something like open301.com, an entity independent and open source.
I don’t understand the business model with URL short-ners. How does a service like tri.im or bit.ly convert these clicks into cash?
This is a joke. It’s clear what this company is after, and should be boycotted for such practices.
I am ashamed for the Nambu Network.
/me shakes head