The URL shortener tr.im appears to be near death. They pulled the plug quite a while ago and are no longer accepting URL shortening requests, but they kept their systems for existing shortened URL’s running.
This past April, the company stated “we would like to shut down the API and redirection service by the end of 2010″. The last few days the service shows a downtime of eight hours per day – perhaps a signal of their last flickerings of life?
WatchMouse monitors 24 URL shorteners, and currently four of them are broken:
- snurl.com: this service has an average uptime of under 90%, rendering the service useless.
- to.: down and out of business
- tr.im: shuttering and out of business
- twurl.cc: down and out of business
Some companies that cease operating their URL shortener leave the shortened links live even though they are in essence out of business; others do not.
Many links on the Internet break because companies providing URL shorteners go out of business or change their policies or priorities. The people that have used these services to shorten a URL are typically not given advance warning, and are simply left with error messages.
And then there is Digg. They had a URL shortener service, but decided to use it internally only. According to this article the promise was made, however, to keep existing short URLs working, but our monitoring reveals that is no longer the case as of November 30.
We recommend you choose your URL shortener wisely, e.g. bit.ly whose core business is URL shortening and should be around for a long time. (Disclaimer: bit.ly is a WatchMouse customer).
Happy Holidays and Happy URL Shortening!
The WatchMouse Team