On Sunday, Nambu said it was shutting down Tr.im, its URL-shortening service. An uproar and offers of help ensued. Today, there’s sort-of-good news: Nambu says it”ll keep Tr.im running indefinitely while it considers its options. (It has strong opinions about what should happen to the Tr.immed URLs if someone else takes them over, though–for instance, it isn’t interested in selling out to someone who’d insert ads or otherwise frame the URL that Tr.im pointed to.)
Nambu’s decision sounds more like a stay of execution than a pardon– “indefinitely” is, by its very definition, a fuzzy term. The world can do just fine without any new Tr.immed URLs being created, but one way or another, I hope all the ones created to date get saved. And hey, “Tr.im” may be the best name anyone ever gave a URL-shortener; if I were in the biz I’d be interested in saving those URLs for the name value alone.