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tr.im announces shutdown

Sunday, August 09, 2009 by Dave Winer.

A picture named car.gifI've done a lot of building on the tr.im url-shortener, as have quite a few other developers. They just announced that they're shutting down. It's not clear what the timeframe is and how long we have to transition. Nor is it clear what will happen with all the tr.im urls that are already out there, will they break, and if so, when? Permalink to this paragraph

The mess this creates makes me feel pretty queasy. I wish this were someone else's problem so I could watch from afar and think "There but for the grace of Murphy go I." But this time the problem is mine. I've done a fair amount of building on tr.im, and I have at least a few users, Nieman and Jay Rosen among them, who are using my tr.im-based tool. Really glad I didn't open up the 40twits app for broader use.  Permalink to this paragraph

If there are any url-shorteners out there that support the same functionality as tr.im, please post a comment here. Permalink to this paragraph

And Twitter, when your DDoS problems are cleared up, please take a look at obviating the need for url-shorteners. This is a harbinger of much more serious problems down the road, should bit.ly prove not to be a profitable business, as tr.im has proven. Permalink to this paragraph




 
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A picture named dave.jpgDave Winer, 54, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

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