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

URL Shortners Are Bad

[Bruha]

They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links. The Idea was to save some bandwidth, but now it uses more because people are having to write scripts that allow mouseovers to see where the link actually goes which now just causes a few lookups of the same url to happen anyways per person rather than just sitting on a post somewhere.

In most cases the URL itself is less than 1% of the size of the content of a web page so exactly who or what they're saving is unclear.

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[X0563511]

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.

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[Deag]

I agree that they break the internet, but the 150 or whatever character limit in Twitter makes it necessary.

So blame Twitter it is their fault.

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[XxtraLarGe]

They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links

Just because some people abuse something doesn't mean that everyone does. I use tr.im all the time, and find it extremely useful, especially since it allows me to send the URL's straight to Twitter. tr.im URL's are only 17 characters long (ex. http://tr.im/aaaa) as opposed to tinyurl's 25 character minimum. When you only have 140 characters to work with, the extra 8 characters to spare can help a lot. I really can't figure out why anybody would use bit.ly or tinyurl over tr.im, at least for Twitter.

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[nstrom]

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.

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

You could instead use a messaging service that allows you to write messages that are long enough to convey real meaning, and not have to worry about the length of your links.

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[sakdoctor]

1. Twitter can fuck off

2. With a bit of sensible design, the sites can manage this functionality themselves.

Redirect short to long. No need for the tinyurl hack.
http://example.com/123
http://example.com/123/arguably-really-long-urls-stuffed-with-keywords-are-good-for-seo

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[larry bagina]

do they have a patent on that? Because it shouldn't be much work for tr.im to add that feature.

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[Sockatume]

"They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links."

Have you ever tried to tell someone, in a conversation, to go to "tech dot slashdot dot org slash story slash zero nine slash zero eight slash nineteen slash one two zero two zero six slash u-r-l dash shortener dash trim dash to dash go dash community dash owned dash open dash source slash? Ever tried to write it down? In that situation, I use tinyurl to change it to something like "tinyurl dot com slash slashdot no space trim". If URLs were human-readable, human-sharable references to documents like they were meant to be, services like tr.im wouldn't exist, but they do.

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[EddyPearson]

"The Idea was to save some bandwidth"

No. It wasn't, and that's a really daft suggestion because the short URL redirects you to the target url, so actually you're adding a tiny overhead.

They were created to turn extrmemly long links (eg. google maps with lon+lat+cruft in the querystring) into easy to remember and easy to transfer short links. A job they do very well.

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[Razalhague]

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

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[houghi]

Can you tell me what is easier to put in an sms or say over the phone
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&saddr=Rotselaarsebaan&daddr=Dutselstraat+to:Leempoelstraat+to:Streekweg+to:Alsbergweg+to:Heuvelstraat+to:Hoensberg+to:50.993122,4.942818+to:Testeltsesteenweg+to:Vennestraat+to:Madestraat+to:Moorsemsestraat+to:Tremelosesteenweg+to:Beemdenstraat+to:Steenweg+op+Gelrode+to:Aarschotsesteenweg%2FN19&hl=en&geocode=FV4eCQMdaG5IAA%3BFX4PCQMd-jhJAA%3BFeDwCAMdrIdJAA%3BFT4nCQMdWxVKAA%3BFY4aCQMdRKNKAA%3BFTZKCQMd8GRLAA%3BFSCyCQMdR1dLAA%3B%3BFS5CCgMdKsxKAA%3BFaNKCgMdoktKAA%3BFc5-CgMduJlJAA%3BFTonCgMd_ppIAA%3BFTYXCgMdUOlIAA%3BFRTgCQMdSydJAA%3BFeynCQMd5DdIAA%3BFWTbCAMdGPBHAA&mra=dpe&mrcr=0&mrsp=7&sz=13&via=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14&sll=50.974751,4.880333&sspn=0.083985,0.253029&ie=UTF8&ll=50.954318,4.837761&spn=0.168044,0.506058&z=12
or http://tinyurl.com/5oknap

Re:URL Shortners Are Bad

[Razalhague]

Have you ever tried to tell someone, in a conversation, to go to "tech dot slashdot dot org slash story slash zero nine slash zero eight slash nineteen slash one two zero two zero six slash u-r-l dash shortener dash trim dash to dash go dash community dash owned dash open dash source slash?

"I'll e-mail you the address."

open URL shorteners?

[zwei2stein]

So, they are going open. How is this going to solve issues that make shorteners evil ( http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/06/are-url-shorteners-a-necessary-evil-or-just-evil/ )?

transparency loss (great, there is db that can resolve links. Are browsers supposed to querry 'shortener like' urls and display proper ones?)

rot & reliability loss (tr.im claims they will be forever open and totally not sell domain to highest bidder and whatnot, but domain is still weakest link - it goes broken and tons of links get broken too)

pointless proxy (great, so it is now pointless 'open' proxy. yay).

Slow news day?

[ashtophoenix]

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.

So?

Re:.im Isle of Man

[Big Hairy Ian]

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

Re:Step 1

[Big Hairy Ian]

Damn that blows out the Cook Islands then [Insert Inuendo].co.ck

"MIT license" != "public domain"

[TimHunter]

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.

rel=shortlink could eradicate URL shorteners

[samj]

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

Re:rel=shortlink could eradicate URL shorteners

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Oh no - not hundreds of milliseconds! Anything but that, for a site I will use a shortener to visit one time in my life! Sounds to me like another case of "I don't understand why people want this, so nobody should have it".

Shortlink is a good idea for what it does - but it still puts the onus on the web site owner to create and permanently save a shortlink for every piece of content that can differ based on "get" parameters. When you're a google, that's a lot of latitudes and longitudes to have to retain forever.

The only argument I've heard against shorteners so far boils down to "but people can misuse it!" -- which in the end boils down to "this is For Your Own Good". Never something I've been particularly fond of - especially on the Internet.

There are some who call me...

[Bandman]

t.im

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