UPDATE: The Tr.im service is NOT Closing Down. Details here.

Tr.im’s Shutdown Shows Risk of Relying on Free Services to Drive Web Traffic

This week’s demise of URL shortener tr.im may come as a bit of a needed wake-up call to bloggers and news Web managers who have become accustomed to relying on free services to drive traffic to their sites.
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According to Tweetmeme, tr.im accounted for less than 4 percent of the shortener market, compared to nearly 80 percent for bit.ly, so the overall impact to Web traffic will be minimal.

The real lesson in all this, though, is that services without business models are a risk to users. If you are planning to build a mission-critical feature on the back of a free Web tool, think again.

Source: Poynter Online

Hat tip: CB

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 and is filed under Search News, Social Media, Software and Web-Based Applications, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.