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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."

6 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Re:URL Shortners Are Bad by Z34107 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    URL shorteners are amazing whenever you have to write down a URL by hand, or read a web address to someone over the phone, or copying it between two computers (maps-dot-google-dot-com-slash-fivethousandlinesoftypoinducinggibberish).

    --
    DATABASE WOW WOW
  2. Re:URL Shortners Are Bad by Razalhague · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Doesn't work if your domain name is long. There's no way to compete with something like tr.im.

  3. "MIT license" != "public domain" by TimHunter · · Score: 4, Interesting
    FTFA:

    Starting today, tr.im will begin its migration into the public domain

    The source code for tr.im will be released under the MIT open-source license.

    Maybe I'm being too literal here, but MIT-licensed source code is not in the public domain.

  4. Re:URL Shortners Are Bad by iamflimflam1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ever had to get someone on a mobile phone to type in a link?

    --
    "Some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help."
  5. rel=shortlink could eradicate URL shorteners by samj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've had a beef with URL shorteners for a long while now for reasons that have been covered ad nauseam (not the least of which being that in addition to adding significant overhead - typically hundreds of milliseconds per request - they are just plain evil). IMO the best solution is to let webmasters create and advertise their own short links using the "shortlink" link relation (e.g. rel="shortlink" in the HTTP headers and/or HTML HEAD) such that they can be auto-detected by clients who then no longer need to generate their own using 3rd party services. I wrote the shortlink specification a few months ago (based on similar work done by others), released it into the public domain using CC Zero and went about soliciting feedback. The standard got a big shot in the arm last week when WordPress.com announced support for rel=shortlink on over 100 million pages. I've since requested support be introduced into the top 20 Twitter clients (representing over 80% of Twitter usage) and have had only positive feedback so far. A number of other high profile sites like PHP.net and Ars Technica have also jumped on board. Anyway if you, like me, are sick of URL shorteners then you're welcome to give me a hand making them go away...

    Sam

  6. Re:URL Shortners Are Bad by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 2, Interesting

    URL Shortners Are Bad....They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links.

    And in other news, GOTO's considered harmful?