The tr.im link-shortening service was shut down yesterday after
its operator Nambu Network was unable to find a buyer.
The company said on its home page it was unable to monetise the
link-shorting service and added, "We regret that it came to this,
but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we
approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount."
Users won't pay to shorten links, and the company could not
interest enough businesses in purchasing trend data on the most
popular links.
Link-shortening services are useful for Twitter users who must
fit them into 140-character updates. The company appeared to blame
the social networking site for some of its problems, saying, "We
just can't justify further development since
Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There
is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for
its upkeep."
Graham Cluley, senior consultant at security firm Sophos, said
tr.im went offline for several hours last Wednesday and that this
may have been the final straw for the service.
It was reportedly due to a denial of service attack, but Cluley
said, "It has been suggested, however, that hackers may not have
been to blame for the tr.im outage, but instead that budget airline
JetBlue may have overwhelmed the service. Last Wednesday, JetBlue
attained over a million followers on Twitter, and announced a
one-day only deal cutting flights by 20 percent.
"They used tr.im to shorten the link, and later acknowledged
that the flood of traffic may have been responsible for breaking
the back of tr.im."