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Twitter developments Speculated on earlier in the year have (mostly) arrived – say hello to OAuth and t.co.
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I reported Sunday that tr.im had announced it was terminating its URL shortening service which, would have the knock on effect of discontinuing all links shortened with the service starting early 2010.

Nambu, the development firm behind tr.im today announced it will be retracting this decision, making its service available once more, and with the promise that links will NOT become unavailable after 2009.

Unfortunately, its not safe to sleep at night in the URL shortening world just yet.

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In a coincidental, but shockingly relevant turn of events, the URL shortening service tr.im as of Sunday August 9th 2009 has announced it will be terminating its URL shortening service, effective immediately.

Regretfully, we here at Nambu have decided to shutdown tr.im, the first step in shutting down all of our products and services within that brand.

tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough. We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential. tr.im pushes (as I write this) a lot of redirects and URL creations per day, and this required significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate.

(Read on at blog.tr.im – blog since terminated)

The coincidental part of the equation lies in my posting to the Visual Blaze blog last week about the many vulnerabilities of utilizing URL shortening services and how URL shortening should be performed with caution.

Shorten URLs with Caution. Here’s why.

As one of the larger players in the URL shortening market, tr.im’s move to shut down their service really drives home the need for users to use external URL shortening services with caution.

To the Nambu Network we express our regrets for the services discontinuation. To all URL shortening users we express our regret for any lose of link traffic that this news may bring.

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The rise of URL shortening

Anyone familiar with Twitter will no doubt have used URL shortening. URL shortening is a technique used to, as the name clearly suggests, shorten the number of characters required for a given URL/link. With Twitter’s 140 character limit, this has become an invaluable technique for adding links to tweets.

But URL shortening is also being used in places other than Twitter (and has been for a number of years). Many are using URL shortening to consolidate long URLs on Web sites, for external links in blog posts, links to downloadable content, and many other things. Some are using these shortening services to make long or complicated URLs easier to read and retype by users, and some for reducing the risk of malformed URLs being sent in emails, with longer and complicated URLs at risk from corruption by varying email clients’ interpretation and multi-line breakage.

Without doubt these services have great value – but their use should be done with caution.

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