Tr.im, an URL shortener, is closing its service. The urls people created with Tr.im will eventually no longer work. A post on the Tr.im blog says no one wanted to take over Tr.im, which suprised Tr.im's owners.
tr.im has thousands and thousands of users, creating tens of thousands of URLs per day. But, we were a little surprised to learn, *no one* wanted to take it over. We quietly contacted a number of people within the Twitter development world, and nobody wanted it in exchange a token amount of money. No one perceived any value in it, or they wanted to operate a shortener under a differently branded domain name.
And, users will not pay for URL shortening, and why should they?
And, the data that tr.im generates — the hottest links that people are sharing right now — is all well and good, but everyone has this data. tr.im gets hit by countless bots every day farming this data to create and operate websites such as tweetmeme.com. So, *everyone* has this data, meaning it is basically worthless *by itself* to base a business on (as bit.ly and others are attempting to do) at least in our humble opinions.
And finally, Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further. 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.
It does seem odd that there wasn't a lot of interest in acquiring Tr.im. It does have a user-base and it has the nice short username that an URL shortener needs.
Tr.im, an URL shortener, is closing its service. The urls people created with Tr.im will eventually no longer work. A 
