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Donation-ware is fine but if the donations don't meet the operating expenses you are suggesting that you will fulfil the gap out of your own pocket. Very simply put, this is not a *sustainable* strategy. It's unsustainable in the long term. It works for Wikipedia because of the natural monopoly and network-effects that further strengthen it's monopoly. It can always fall back on a revenue model by using advertisements if it comes down to it. It has a tremendous value proposition for the community that cannot be offered by anyone else.
But for tr.im, digging into your own pockets is unsustainable unless you have really deep pockets or you have struck an iron-clad agreement with a highly sustainable hosting provider. Should you fall off the face off the earth tomorrow (I hope not) what will happen to tr.im? Will you be leaving a trust fund behind? The same money you will be putting toward tr.im could be used for even greater humanitarian good and you should just let other sustainable businesses fight it out, or strive to make tr.im sustainable. And again, if you had the ability to do this all along then why the ruckus to shut it down? If your intention was to draw attention, then I sincerely applaud you for the marketing.
But I am still in disbelief. You will be facing forever increasing costs as the user base continues to grow. There is still no revenue model so you will forever be operating as a cost-centre and forever require donations. You can add very little value that your competitors cannot. The value of opening up database is again very little because that won't help alleviate link-rot. The community will strive to eliminate cookies and user-tracking so you won't derive much intelligence out of it and even if you do, you cannot monetize it because it's free for all. You will have negative cash flow and in the long run you are economically doomed. Your value proposition is bleak (your competitors already offer the same service) and the worst part is that the risk is ever-increasing because the more links tr.im hosts, the worse the impact will be if the company goes out of service. It's like a ever growing time-bomb waiting to go off.
Not only that, but the risks associated with tr.im make it ever more riskier and users would be prudent to use a service that *is* sustainable because they'll get better link continuity. That means that your sustainable competitor will benefit from network-effects and you will be even worse off than you think.
I wish I were there to talk you out of this decision before you made it. You had better alternatives. Maybe you still do.
I, for one, like the service that tr.im (and pic.im) provides. I'm also deeply enamored of Nambu, and believe that it is the best Twitter client out there. I'd hate for an impression formed during a stressful time to be the basis of an opinion of you or your company, and this move goes a long way towards changing that. I'm glad to see tr.im transition to this status, and wish you the best of luck. What I think that I, and everyone else in the Nambu/tr.im community needs right now, is an assurance that Nambu will continue development, and that some of the larger bugaboos will be squashed, soon. That, couple with this announcement, will go a long way towards repairing your standing in the community.
I'm In!!
Option 1: Try to sell = very tough to get back what you've put in
Option 2: Quit = See cartoon above
Option 3: Try to sell again = Even tougher given all the negative numbskulls
Option 301 = OK, but far from optimal
Option 4: OpenSource = Great Idea, hopefully it will be well received and you will live on like Jimmy Wales (Only I hope you make much more than he does)
Best of Luck to Tr.im
Hopefully Option 5 comes in at the 11th hour... Google to the rescue!
- me
There could be tools - both server side and client side - that replaces a dysfunctional shortener with a functional one - just like http://www.longurlplease.com/ does for even functional shorteners.
Still - it's applaudable that you're changing your decision on this one.
I hope you will in short order post something that clears up the confusion surrounding the future of Nambu for the Mac.
Good luck.
Thanks Eric :)
Opening up tr.im to the community is the right move, and a great idea that makes it stand out from the rest, which IMO is a key part to the success of any idea/product/service.
Look out for the opportunities that will come.
Bitter? Man...Learn, flush and move on. They won, you lost. Happens in business EVERY DAY. Let it go.
P.S. Awesome that it looks like the project will stay alive. Love the service.
http://twitter.com/mseibert/status/3367444747
I will be happy to donate do a non-commercial entity as soon as it is available. :-)
One thing to point out though (and it does seem like you have the best intentions) is that you would need to setup an entity to hold the assets so that you don't decide to take tr.im in the other direction should it turn into a raging success.
The community is making the investment so we would want to see dividends.
Also, I'd to not that Spinn3r would love to be one of your first data consumers (including click stream data).
Kevin
- Such an entity is a corporation but it cannot have share holders.
- The entity can have members who are responsible for deciding on the direction and course of the entity, i.e., it is community owned
- There can be different levels of membership, with different voting rights...
- Other roles include the more traditional president, chairman and secretary roles as well as establishing a board of directors.
- These types of org are also restricted from distributing profits or assets to members or employees.
- These types of entity can be tax exempt if they operate in the right way, and can apply for federal charity status which means donations can be tax deductible.
- In the entity's articles of incorporation, it can also state that only other non profit public benefit entities can acquire the assets of this entity, somewhat restricting the likely use of any assets in the future if the company was acquired.
Google's OpenSocial is a good example of an entity structured this way. - http://www.opensocial.org/page/opensocial-found...
The documents on the site show a relevant example because they also show their non IP assertion agreements which are essential, so that any contributor of code will have to sign off on never litigating against trim for IP infringement.
Mozilla is also a good example of an entity with this structure - http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/
Also the Open Web Foundation (http://openwebfoundation.org/) was set up to help community driven standards efforts from a legal framework perspective. I'm not sure if they help, but I can put you in contact with someone there.
I have set up an entity like open social (www.openviewing.org), but without the membership aspect. I'm not a lawyer but I would be more than happy to talk through my limited experience.
Fuck tr.im.
Question about click-thru statistics: What will this mean for existing users that have private click stats? Do I recall that correctly as being a member's only feature of Tr.im? (Feature link is gone at the moment.)
Thanks!
EDITED- I see that public aggregate click stats are the stated plan going forward.
We give domains to Open projects for FREE
Please see: http://www.oscon.com/
We will pay any transfer costs, and are willing to pay reasonable requests for costs as well
We guarantee we have NEVER sold a domain
Feel free to contact me Ric AT openajax dot COM
I also see that GNIP will be providing access to the data, is this going to provide some income? I'd like to see tr.im covering its expenses and thought this data would be key, maybe keep the real-time for yourself and give the old data, i.e. older than 24 hours, for free. I want to see tr.im prosper and not to be facing another financial crisis in 6 months time because we, the community, has driven the load upwards and made it financially difficult for you.
I would assume that it the source code will end up on Github, and I will start as the maintainer with others to help as they come forward, but the finer details remain to be worked out. I would love to hear from anyone that wants to work with me on extending the tr.im feature set and capabilities. There are no doubt many developers out there much better than us that will be able to point out many possible improvements.
For instance, TightURL powers ur1.ca and 2tu.us
I for one had an aha moment and thought of how much money twitter.com must be charging bit.ly for using them, and if not, it must be all power and networking (bit.ly could be a major share holder in twitter)
Anyways, for Twitter, facebook and others to allow users to use the URL shortening service of their preference there needs to be a standard API interface for websites to request a URL to be shortened, something as simple as http://<url shortening domain>/shorten/<target url> but standard, everyone right now has their own requesting URL, and even return formats... keep it simple guys
Then the URL shortening service could provide the requesting client some standard headers:
-------
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Hits: <number of hits if url was created previously, 0 for new url>
Creation-date: <GMT date when url was created>
<Other standard HTTP headers>
<shortened url>
------
Then it's just a matter of changing the domain in your URL shortening request parameters and the social network site, email service (think Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, tons of $$ for tr.im if a deal like would ever be cut, and if not those big players decide to let users choose, then every URL shortener wins), or whatever site could implement any URL shortenner. Maybe now that tr.im goes open, this will be a reality.
2) Can you share tr.im's business plan?
"What is this?"
"It´s a Short URL service"
"Who´s Short URL Service is this?"
"It´s tr.im´s!"
"Who is tr.im?"
"Tr.im´s dead, baby! Tr.im´s dead...."
I will try to find a mechanism to reach you via email to see if I can propose an alternate solution as I do not see an easy to contact address for you here.
Regards
IMRAN
http://IMRAN.PK
http://IMRAN.COM
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."
-- Mohandas Gandhi, possibly quoting the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America but true no matter who said it first.
Look forward to checking out the source and submitting patches.
Unfortunately, because tr.im was shutting down, I switched everything to bit.ly quickly so all work related twitter and facebook and RSS links would keep on going. And now I'm leaving this internship for a new challenge so... I cannot switch back anymore for lack of time. (Twitterfeed didn't reinstall tr.im for url shortening yet). That is a real pity! I loved tr.im and if things normalize, I hope I can still get them here to switch it back!
If we can't compete, we'll give it away and saturate the market. Might do some damage.
Not sure it will create any more quality. I am curious to see the code.
I wrote a blog post called Egregious Failures, where I included the scathing comment I gave you, and cited it as an egregious failure on my part. If you read it, you'll realize I'm a hypocrite, because my URL shortening service Th8.us had a three day outage one month before. My service receives 1/1000 of the visitors that tr.im gets, but on principle my comment was wrong. Unlike my service, your service did not go offline at all. You just made an announcement which made people angry. TinyURL and Twitter have had major outages in the past few months. Your mistake was insignificant in comparison. If I did not read your blog or check your home page when you had the announcement up, I would not even know about it now.
Do you know what Twitter should do? Ditch all URL shorteners and just flag all URLs as 25 characters toward the 140, regardless of length. Problem solved.
Sorry and good luck,
Richard
I'm waiting to see your neat Drupal-based project rolling.
pc games
http://staffingpower.com/
Thanks
Mclaughlin
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