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tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

The eulogy from their page at tr.im:

Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.  However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.  Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.  No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

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 annointed bit.ly the market winner.  There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

Earth-trembling news: URL shortening has no viable business model, other than doing fingers-crossed rain-dances hoping someone buys their company* (likely in the hopes of selling it themselves).

(*) Brilliant domain name notwithstanding, not sure I would consider a 20 line PHP script a company, much less trust them — a shaky third party — with maintaining URL links.

Apart from character conserving for Twitter, what’s the point of shortening links anyway? Aesthetic? Ease of input? How many people type in tr.im or bit.ly links anyway, versus copy and paste them?