Facing a tough competition from fellow rivals such as TinyURL and Bit.ly and the hefty costs in running the network, the folks at Nambu Network have planned to shut down its URL shortener, tr.im, including all of their products and services related to that brand. Users are wondering what will happen to their tr.im shortened URLs and the answers provided by the team there is that the “statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward” and “all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009”.
With thousands of users around the world creating tens of thousands of shortened URLs and tons of redirects every day, there’s no doubt that it’s rather impossible to prosper in the long-run without any significant development investment and the reluctance of users forking out money to pay for URL shortening services. Despite being one of the shortest URL shortening tool on the net which offers really cool graphical statistics on their URLs (how many times they were visited, from which locations, and referred by which websites), it’ll still lose out to bit.ly which is currently the most widely-used URL shortening service by Twitter users.
Because of Twitter’s 140-characters limit, URL shortening services have been quite popular with users all thanks to the micro-blogging platform’s phenomenal growth. According to Tweetmeme, bit.ly dominates the Twitterverse, grabbing a market share of 78.86%. TinyURL comes in second with 14.35% and tr.im 2.92% (May stats).