In my classroom, I used URL shorteners all the time. On top of that, I use them as a long term strategy, not just hit and run Twitter posts. My basic rule of thumb is as follows: The longer the URL, the more likely my students will make a typo and yell “It’s broken!” URL shorteners not only reduce the chance of error, but also allow me to assign some sort of memorable label to the link (http://bit.ly/kinney is one, non-working example).
Last week, Tr.im kicked the bucket. The bolding below is mine.
Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.
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.
There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and 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.
(Note: This notice has since been taken down and Tr.im is back for the time being. Still, my point remains the same)1
This isn’t “We’re bored and want to take up rock climbing.” It’s likely that other services will suffer the same fate in the future. You may be a little less naive than I am, but when I shortened all of my URLs, I assumed they’d be around forever. Tr.im’s annoucement throws a monkey wrench in that assumption.
John Gruber, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Joshua Schachter all recommend that sites consider rolling their own shortened URLs. Zeldman suggests using the ShortURL plug-in for Wordpress to simplify this process. I personally have ShortURL installed on my site—similar to Zeldman.
- Source: Daring Fireball—Tr.im ‘Resurrected’ ↩
