“No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.”
I appreciate tr.im’s honesty.
From what I understand, tr.im’s business model was similar to bit.ly’s and – what increasingly feels like – Twitter’s business model: aggregate and sell statistics on how information is being shared on real-time basis.
Measuring word-of-mouse if you will.
Given how fleeting and how nascent the real-time stream is, it feels like trying to measure string pushing.
Sure there’s a result, but if value = effect - effort then the real value (relevance, importance, and significance) – doesn’t unfold until the pushing stops.
To that end – I don’t see tr.im’s (or any other URL shortener’s) breaking the internet for more than 5 minutes.
If anything this shutdown is a reminder that URL shorteners are cheap hacks apologizing for poor content-management-systems, network security risks, and that publishers should be shortening themselves.
Elsewhere, related:
“even a minor amount” — ouch.