URL Shortener tr.im To Go Community-Owned, Open Source

Death Metal sends word that the owners of URL-shortening service tr.im are in the process of releasing the project's source code and moving it into the public domain. This comes after reports that the service may shut down and that they were entertaining offers from prospective buyers. From a post on the site's blog: "It is our hope that tr.im, being an excellent URL shortener in its own right, can now begin to stand in contrast to the closed twitter/bit.ly walled garden: it will become a completely open solution owned and operated by the community for the benefit of the entire community." They plan to complete the transition by September 15th, and the code will be released under the MIT license. In addition, "tr.im will offer all link-map data associated with tr.im URLs to anyone that wants it in real-time. This will involve a variety of time-based snapshots of aggregated destination URLs, the number of tr.im URLs created for any given destination URL, and aggregate click data."

Comments

These Guys are Masters of PR

[ergo98]

It's yet another shortening service, among a field of hundreds, few of which have any legitimate reason for existing beyond shock-links. They cried like little children because Twitter (a dumb, artificially restricted service) had a "preferred" service, so after stomping their feet for a while, pulling a little tantrum (did they *really* think there was a business model behind this garbage?) they then came back with this "we'll show them!" response. Cheap.

Why do they keep getting this attention?

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[AP31R0N]

"Guns serve no other purpose than to murder people."

"Cars serve no other purpose than to run over people and pollute the air."

"VCR record buttons serve no other purpose than to make illegal copies of movies."

"The internet serves no other purpose than to rip off people and distribute child pornography."