Also, the developer behind Cli.gs isn’t taking potshots at Bit.ly for being the default shortener for Twitter, like Tr.im did, and went so far as to state in a comment on Mashable:

I’d like to emphasize that having bit.ly as the default for Twitter is in no way part of the decision to shut down. As I said in the post, it’s a one man operation that has grown too big for me to maintain it.

That is what I call a professional attitude.

We have restored tr.im, and re-opened its website. We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the popular response, and the countless public and private appeals I have received to keep tr.im alive.

We have answered those pleas. Nambu will keep tr.im operating going forward, indefinitely, while we continue to consider our options in regards to tr.im’s future.

They still want to sell, but they’re not shutting everything down as they had initially intended. (As @atomicpoet put it: “Seriously, can’t these guys even commit to the cause of quitting?”)

Tr.im still claims that the reason that they want to get out of the “URL shortening business” is that Twitter has stacked the deck against them.

Twitter has stacked the URL shortening business opportunity overwhelmingly in bit.ly’s favour, as twitter.com currently operates. This is not whining, as some have suggested, but a simple reality. If we post a link to this blog article by its title Twitter switches our tr.im URL to a bit.ly URL. bit.ly has a monopoly position that cannot be challenged with reasonable investment or innovation unless Twitter offers choice.

I find that state to be patently ridiculous. Before Bit.ly was Twitter’s default URL shortener, TinyURL was…well before Tr.im got into the “URL shortening business.” Not only that, but I’m willing to bet that most people shorten URLs before they tweet, rather than letting Twitter do it for them. I do. I spend a fair bit of time on Twitter, and most of the links I see coming in (other than ones using Tr.im) are shortened with Ow.ly or Is.gd, with a smattering of Bit.ly ones here and there. It’s hardly a “monopoly.”

And what does it matter, anyway? If you have enough people using your service, you can monetize it. You may not get to the point where you can be the biggest URL shortener, but that won’t stop you from paying for the service and generating a profit. All that’s missing is a monetization strategy.

I can think of several ways to monetize Tr.im. Premium accounts with more analytical features, developer keys with a higher rate limit for the shortener’s API, just to name a couple.

Twitter isn’t stopping you from succeeding, Tr.im, you are.

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.

This is what a lot of doomsayers (doombloggers?) have been afraid of. Imagine the millions of Tr.im short URLs that will no longer work once the service goes down, despite the fact that the location they point to still exists: Link rot, as it is called, on a massive scale.

I’ve shortened many links with Tr.im in the past. My auto-tweets of blog posts were shortened with Tr.im for a time, and for the past few months I’ve had my default shortener in Tweetie set to Tr.im. I’ve probably created a few hundred Tr.im links, none of which will work come December 31st.

Personally, I’m hoping that someone will step in and buy them out so the links don’t go away. Perhaps Bit.ly? They seem to have monetization plans, and they’re definitely in it for the long term. A large collection of new links, with a secondary domain, wouldn’t be a bad acquisition.

All this makes me wonder, will more publishers be getting their own short domains so they don’t have to outsource short URLs to other services? Should I be registering a short domain for my posts, and for other links I might tweet?