There are plenty of people in the Middle East who use Tr.im as URL shortener. Regretfully, they have decided to shutdown after 12 months in business; however, the network mother company will remain, Nambu Network.
Even this service has been in business, it has not generated income or interest among investors to acquire it; despite the fact that thousands of users were using it for ten thousands of URL shortening every single day. No one perceived any value in it, or they wanted to operate a URL shortener under a differently branded domain name.
According to their blog post, they claim that Twitter has all but sapped them of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further. They said: “What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future.”
This draws a big questions for all mash-up developers that are popping-up everyday with new URL shortener, such service requires significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate and as they said, no one perceived any value in the service and user-base, or they wanted to operate a shortener under a differently branded domain name. Simply, nobody wanted it in an exchange with token amount of money.
Hi Magnus,
If my blog was up and running by April, I would have mentioned it, because it’s really a visionary step.
For everyone, you can read more about shuffle.to here: http://www.shufflegazine.com/2009/04/02/shufflegazines-own-tinyurl/
One reason why we developed our own service: http://shuffle.to