According to Mashable, bit.ly investor Betaworks offered to tr.im to “host his URL mappings starting tomorrow”.

Last week-end, tr.im – the URL shortening service related to Nambu.com – ceased operations:

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

The inconvenience mentioned here is millions of URLs that will be lost by the end of 2009, taking with them valuable information on the content itself as well as the previous access to this content.

We used tr.im in the beginning intensively, as well as Nambu, the native Mac OSX client for Twitter. However, as it became obvious that the operation was instable – I just want to mention the numerous and continuing problems with Nambu – we decided about 3 months ago to switch to bit.ly, leaving behind approximately 1,500 URLs that weren’t retrievable and now will be lost.

What are the learnings from the tr.im debacle?:

1. We’re entering a phase of consolidation of Twitter services, which is a good sign of a maturing market.

2. Therefore, choose your services wisely: There are numerous Twitter based services and mash-ups out there that practically offer no additional value to the established ones.

3. On the contrary, some of them seem to be just alive for malicious purposes, such as Twitter password fishing or phishing.

4. If you are tweeting for a professional reason, for example as a corporate social media representative, choose your services wisely. Look for its reputation in the community, for its backers, its investors first. So, it is tweet first, if you are not sure – and the Twitter community is just great for this purpose.

5. Never, ever provide your Twitter password to an obsure service, requiring to enter your Twitter user and original password. A lot of services meanwhile offer access by Oauth to boost confidence in their operations.

6. “You won’t get fired for buying IBM” still applies… ;)

As far as Susuh is concerned, we chose bit.ly for two reasons:

• It is the preferred URL shortener of Twitter itself and has really prominent investors
• It will be a major player in the future of real-time search based on the Twitter life-stream.

Find more on our ideas on real-time search and an interesting post on wired.com on “Twitter URL Service Bit.ly Says No to Ads, Yes to Data-Mining News”.

Yesterday, I “installed” v1.1.10 that rendered Nambu useless for me. Even the old version 1.1.6 is no longer working. I can enter the tr.im credentials and @susuh‘s URLs are listed.

But as soon as I try to add a Twitter account Nambu refuses any form of cooperation. Basically, I am caught in loop and I have to terminate the program as the menu is disabled:

This morning, I removed all remains of Nambu from my MacBook and started over with a fresh download. Guess what? See above.

Reported the error yesterday to support, no answer yet.

I want to like Nambu. Really. But it is not easy. :(

See also:

(1) Twitter Software (1): Nambu – the free Mac OS X Twitter client

(2) Twitter Software (2): Nambu – the free Mac OS X Twitter client – published version 1.1.6

If you put effort into sharing information with the Twitterverse you want to be retweeted. Content is of course king–the better the quality of a tweet the more likely it will be retweeted.

However, I believe there is also another issue: RT comfort for the retweeters. Think of it as applying the 1-Click-buy concept of Amazon to Twitter. There are 2 major styles of retweeting:

• “RT @USERNAME ” + [Tweet]


• [Tweet] + “ (via @USERNAME)”

As we have 140 characters for a full tweet, you can do the math:

• #1 requires 5 characters + a maximum of 15 characters for the USERNAME = 20 characters and


• #2 requires 8 characters + a maximum of 15 characters for the USERNAME = 23 characters

And therefore, I appreciate the counter so much… :)

(Btw, cool would be of course a second color for the characters #118 to #140.)

See also:

(1): Nambu – the free Mac OS X Twitter client

I tested both Tweetdeck and Twhirl – and did not enjoy working with them, mostly because they are running on top of Adobe AIR. In addition, Tweetdeck is having some annoying usability issues.

So, when I heard of Nambu – the native Mac OS X Twitter client application – I thought having a look wouldn’t hurt. And it didn’t. In fact, I am thrilled. So much, that even will upgrade to 10.5 next week-end. Being old school, I do not like touching my running & productive MacBook unnecessarily but Nambu is the exception… ;)

Nambu has the look & feel of great software: design, usability and processes – all looks good to me!

You like the directory view?

Or do you prefer the column view? Note the pick-list for the content of a column, it can even be results from a saved search:

If you have ever set up a group in Tweetdeck, you will appreciate Nambu’s search-field:

Need additional information about a Twitterer? Right at you hands:

Cool use-case for the search-feature:

Why integrate 3rd party services – such as URL shortening or picture tweeting – that you have no control over? Here you can see Nambu’s picture service pic.im…

…and more important my beloved tr.im for URL shortening:

Btw: I didn’t manage to log-in to tr.im via Nambu using my Twitter credentials but had to use my tr.im account credentials instead.

Okay, so, integrating these 2 services may look a bit Apple-ish, but if it works in a stress-free manner, I am with it… :)

Another nice feature: URLs received from other tweets…

…and URLs sent:

That could be the first step towards a real link repository.

Final screenshot shows the handling of multiple accounts:

Last but not least:

Nambu also supports Growl for notification, as well as other messaging services such as Identi.ca and Laconi.ca.

Conclusion:

• Forget Tweetdeck if you’re running MacOS 10.5. If not, upgrade to 10.5 and use Nambu – it’s free, too!


• Remarkably mature software given the recent release date.

• A tweet-management-system that lets me decide if and when to share a tweet across more than one account.


• A link repository.


• Group management 2.0: Show group-members of individual groups as well as all followers simultaneously in different boxes and provide means to distribute them among groups.