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

Posted by Soulskill on from the keeping-up-with-the-twitses dept.

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."

3 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Re:URL Shortners Are Bad by X0563511 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Or, you can just use tinyurl. This gives someone the option to use the preview.tinyurl.com subdomain, which will put you on a landing page and not automatically redirect.

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    For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
  2. Re:URL Shortners Are Bad by nstrom · · Score: 5, Informative

    The original use of URL shortening services was to prevent link breakage in e-mail and nntp clients that linebreak after 80 characters. They still work great for this. http://tr.im/wGhA works a lot better in e-mail than http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1600+pennsylvania+ave,+dc&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=49.624204,58.359375&ie=UTF8&ll=38.898732,-77.038515&spn=0.012007,0.014248&z=16 . I've also heard shortened links used to good effect on internet radio, where it's easier to direct listeners to a tinyurl than a long forum URL, when there's discussion about a certain thread.

  3. Re:.im Isle of Man by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 4, Informative

    I used to live there it is a Protectorate of The Crown pretty much like Jersey, Guernsey & Gibraltar except the weather is not as good

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    Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.