RIP: tr.im
Martyn Williams, who surely had better things to do, chose instead to write about the downfall of tr.im, a nearly unknown url shortener, who sought to compete with the equally stupid sounding bit.ly, tinyurl.com, and the almost-longer-than-the-original readthisurl.com. And we here at CANS are glad he did, as we were all set to launch into the beta testing phase of our own url shortening website. We had already run into a few snags with our program, not the least of which was the fact that our “shortened” urls were promising to look something like “http://crazyapplenews.com/shortening/index.php/sle4231xfSEslkeyggiotr78Cvdew” 1
We will now observe a minute of silence for the fallen tr.im, shortened to three seconds, as they would have wanted it.
Thank you.
- I was going to actually make that link live, but decided at the last moment not to do three hours of coding and testing for a one-line throw away gag [↩]
Tee hee. Don’t use Twitter. What else are tiny urls used for?
Isn’t the shortening what makes them puff up in the oven?
I use them every so often in emails when I don’t want to send a huge long link, but Twitter is definitely what saved the whole look-my-url-is-tiny genre of websites.