It’s not everyday one hears a company say its business didn’t stand a chance.
But that was basically the gist of the announcement by Vancouver-based Nambu Networks when it said that it would pull the plug on tr.im, its 12-month-old URL shortening service.
“There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but anointed bit.ly the market winner,” read the surprisingly blunt notice posted on the tr.im Web site over the weekend.
URL shorteners compress lengthy Web site addresses into pithy links that are better suited for sharing on social media services like Twitter, in which a person’s messages are limited to 140 characters.
Bit.ly, backed by a number of venture capital investors, is the default shortener on Twitter — Web links pasted into Twitter posts are automatically shortened with bit.ly.
