Sunday, 11th of October 2009 at 11:05:13 PMTwitter has an automatic method of shortening the URL so that your Tweet can stay within the character guidelines. And it works well. I recently switched to tr.im because it has cool tracking capabilities. So I have used this method of shortening my long URLs until today!!! I found that all the posts were nonfunctional because of an “overload” in their system. Here is what you might see when their servers are overloaded:
I am going to work with other methods. Your ideas, recommendations and suggestions are welcome.
UPDATE ON 12-27-09
When I first posted this on Oct 11th perhaps tr.im was starting to have troubles. I’m not sure. I was just a little alarmed by the occasional overload error messages. More recently, the messages have become much more frequent. The results are that when people click on a tr.im shortened URL link on Twitter they go to the error message instead of to the blog post.
Today, I totally redid all my links and switched over to bit.ly – which is the default URL shortener for Twitter. When I first got started with Twitter a few months ago I didn’t know what I was doing. I should have hooked up with bit.ly like most of the rest of you.
Here are some words I just found on the tr.im site:
“Regretfully, we here at Nambu have decided to shutdown tr.im, the first step in shutting down all of our products and services within that brand.
“tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough. We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential. tr.im pushes (as I write this) a lot of redirects and URL creations per day, and this required significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate…..
“So, in summary, there is simply no point in continuing to operate or work on tr.im, and we are moving on to greener pastures. We appreciate all the support and kind words about tr.im we received over the past 12 months, but change is ultimately good, and bit.ly can more than accommodate your URL shortening needs.” TR.IM site
Just thought I would let any of you know who might be using them to shorten your URLs and for tracking. I really like bit.ly Their tracking is outstanding and their entire interface is much more user-friendly than TR.IM ever was.
