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Simon Willison’s Weblog

tr.im is "discontinuing service". “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.”—these statements seem to contradict themselves. Will tr.im URLs in tweets stop working after December 31st or not? Any chance they could hand the domain over to the Internet Archive? At any rate, this is exactly why centralised URL shorteners are a harmful trend.

Posted 10th August 2009 at 11:06 am

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4 comments

  1. This is why services like Twitter should be doing their own URL shortening. With the Flickr URL shortening presumably the shortened URL will have the lifespan of the full URL. Twitter have the old twttr.com domain...

    Ian McKellar - 10th August 2009 13:41 - #

  2. Interesting problem. If Twitter cares about the dead links, they can go through their database and see which links point where and correct these.

    I hate shorteners.

    Nosredna - 10th August 2009 18:05 - #

  3. Could they be collaborating with Twitter to ensure that the links on Twitter get rewritten so that they do continue to work?

    Colin - 10th August 2009 19:52 - #

  4. It's not like Twitter even needs a shortener in the first place. They don't let you paste long URLs that break the 140 character limit, but they shorten them anyway. What's the point?

    URL shorteners are a two-hour hack job, and Twitter could learn to respect rel="alternate short" if it absolutely must trim off those characters. Here's one that I made with MySQL+PHP: http://mike.teczno.com/notes/the-shortest-thing.ht ml

    Michal Migurski - 10th August 2009 21:38 - #

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