Short URL Redirection - Part 2

Shortened URL's are getting increasingly popular everyday. Some services such as tr.im actually offer traffic statistics on how many people click each URL, and from what location they're located. It's really great to see that there are multiple URL shortening service choices for users around the world.

In the past, we did use lenks.net for all of our URL shortening needs, but for the time being we've decided to choose another service with more features. At first, I was a little wary about tr.im, because I didn't know much about it. However, now I'm feeling a bit better about it because it is the shortest URL for a URL shortening service out there.

Unfortunately, these services are difficult to monetize and these can be expensive to run.... especially a service as big as tr.im which doesn't have the support that bit.ly has gotten from twitter. A week ago The Nambu Network Inc. announced that they were shutting down tr.im completely. Luckily, tr.im was been brought back to life by almost immediately after it's announcement of being shut down. There was so much popular demand that Eric Woodard from The Nambu Network Inc. has agreed to handle the shortfall in tr.im’s operating expenses, in the tr.im blog indefinitely. He's also agreed to make it community owned and operated from donations, and release the code as open source. In my opinion, this is absolutely brilliant! I'm really glad tr.im is sticking around and that it is going open source.

Well, I don't particularly care for the fact that at the present time twitter has integrated bit.ly into their services. I liked it the way it was before they integrated everything together. The service also doesn't always shorten URLs so I'll be posting something on our twitter, from nullshells, and then it won't shorten it. Really frustrating... so I think I'll just use tr.im to setup the URLs I want to shorten.

Going forward, as stated in their blog, "tr.im will add the capability for anyone to use their own domain name on tr.im’s platform, also free of charge, on a donation basis." I'm waiting for this capability, this is something I'm eagerly anticipating.