The Nambu network; owners of tr.im, a URL shortener, has announced that the service will be shut down as from today.

Recently, the service has gone through many outages and the ‘fail banana’(yes, a banana) has been seen frequently.

The reasons stated are that it’s impossible to monetize it and bit.ly has won the URL shortener ‘war’ since it was announced as the default shortener for links on Twitter. They say that “We made our best efforts to sell tr.im before this announcement.”. Personally, I think that it’s really unfair that they didn’t allow users to export their statistics before closing the service. The links will work until at least December 31 2009.

I agree with the first statement as it’s really difficult, if not impossible, to monetize it. For example, if they decide to insert ads on redirected  pages, people will flock to the plethora of ad-free URL shorteners. However, I don’t agree with the second as I believe that as long as people are using a service, it has a chance of becoming popular: Two years ago, TinyURL was the ‘king’ of URL shorteners, today it’s bit.ly, next year it could be another, who knows?

The service had many advantages, namely:

• A killer domain name.
• Good and beautifully-presented statistics.
• A Firefox add-on.

If you were a frequent user and are looking for an alternative service or you just want to try something new, please checkout the Etiole Network’s very own URL shortener Hop.im.

P.S. I’m Saajid Vawda(sjdvda), one of the new writers on Etiole, you can visit my blog or you can follow me on Twitter.