Tr.im announces that it’s going open source! What is this talk? Tr.im was supposed to shut down it service completely, but had decided to stay around. Then come this new news that Tr.im will release its source code for everyone. This means you and I can go get Tr.im’s source code, install that onto a server, and run a free URL Shortening Service.
Bloggers and Twitterers love URL Shortening Service as it allows them to shorten their blog posts’ web addresses, and promote their blogs on Twitter and other similar social network portals. Shorter URL saves some space when using Twitter as Twitter allows only so many characters to be in a tweet. Also, Shorter URL makes a long ugly link looks nicer.
The problem of using URL Shortening Service is that you are relying on a third party to handle your web links. When a URL Shortening Service that you are using is going out of business, all your web links that you had promoted to friends, online social network portals, and so on will be lost. Your true web links are still there, but the problem is that newer people won’t be able to find your true web links.
If URL Shortening Service is a must for you, I suggest you run a URL Shortening application on a server or on an affordable web-host, and use that for yourself. You don’t have to advertise your URL Shortening service at all, unless you want to run a free URL Shortening Service. With this in mind, you can use Tr.im’s source code to run your own operation.
Vinh Nguyen
