As a point of strategy, let's hope that the tr.im founders knew they were taking a big gamble, because this was pretty obvious from the beginning.

With no clear business model except for a hope that someone buys them out, it was just a lottery ticket.

A business like a URL shortener is a particularly dangerous one, since if you succeed your costs skyrocket quickly yet you still have no business model. This forces people quickly to either sell or shut down. Even worse, you're likely to succeed at getting users since everyone knows what it is and needs one, tricking you into thinking you're succeeding when all you're doing is bleeding money.

If you're starting a business doing something that everyone loves and there are already 10 of them but you have no business model, you should probably stop right away unless you have some serious capital, preferably external capital.

There's gotta be at least another couple dozen of these failure coming in the future....

Sad to know that someone probably poured a lot of heart into this and now it goes down the tubes.

However, be ye warned: This is what happens when you base everything on somebody else, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, Google or whomever. They can crush you in an instant, and often it's just because you're too insignificant to matter to them.

Don't forget to include Apple in that group...

How does Apple belong to that group? They (also) sell hardware and people pay for them. Unlike url shorteners or twitter etc..

Apple iphone store economics? They have developers in the hundreds of thousands, basing your business on it and pretending they care is mostly the same thing.

For iPhone developers. If Apple decides it doesn't like you, it will cut off your only source of revenue for your product. And they have proven to be capable of that.

hm. I wonder.. how much of why they want to shut down is the hosting costs? it seems like the perfect sort of business for a "Host me for the publicity" deal. I'd be more than happy to give them hosting just for the bragging rights, and I'm sure many of my competitors would also be interested.

This is lame. And it's such a weakness of URL shorteners.

100% correct. I don't use url shortners if I can help it, as it's introducing yet another point of failiure in internet hyperlinks.

Who wants to bet that in a year or two there'll be another few url shortening services down the drain, and millions more broken links out there on the net.

Interesting that they are also stopping development on Nambu as a part of this: http://blog.tr.im/post/159489555/tr-im-to-december-31-2009#c...

I do hope they open source it. That client had the most potential from the native Mac ones that I've tried.

Quite interesting that there are more than a few people interesting in purchasing it on the comments for that post (and the previous post). I wonder how much money they're looking for and why they wouldn't sell it now even after they've made "quiet" efforts to sell it earlier?

I'll give them credit for how they are communicating and hope for the best to them. I'm sure the developers there gained and learned something in all this. Unfortunately though, if they were to get bought now, they will look like hypocrites.

http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/shorturl-savior/ Bit.ly is willing to host their urls starting as of tomorrow. tr.im has not yet responded.