So, now, Tr.im’s parent company, Nambu, has announced that the URL shortening service known as tr.im is turning off its service and that links will stop working after December 31. Here’s the news on Techmeme.
What will this do? Well, first of all, any stats are gone. Bam. Second of all, all Tr.im URLs will stop working at the end of the year. Bam. (In an email to me, Nambu’s CEO said that links could be extended past December 31, but he wouldn’t guarantee it).
OK, most of you probably never have used tr.im to shorten your URLs so they fit into Twitter. But I did. I liked the URL better than bit.ly, which is the service that Twitter has “blessed.” Oh, how I hate Twitter’s “blessing.” This is a company that is building a channel for celebrities, bots, spammers, and a few of other types who like to tell each other short sweet nothings but really wants to be a platform for the world’s people, APIs, devices, etc to talk with each other.
I want that world too, but Twitter has made it so I — and increasingly the developers I interview who are building stuff on top of Twitter — don’t trust Twitter. Why? Because of several reasons:
1. I can’t get to my old Tweets. Seriously. They are, I’m sure, on a server somewhere in San Francisco, but I can’t get to them. Twitter search only shows the last few weeks and I’ve asked developers if they can get them but they can only get to the last few thousand Tweets. I’ve been through this before. The first two years of my blog are gone. Someone turned off a server and I was stupid enough not to back up those items first. Oh well.
2. Follower numbers are about as inaccurate as Google’s numbers are (we all know that when Google says there are 685,000 mentions of Robert Scoble you know that’s a total made up number, right?) Follower numbers are just as made up. Twitter artificially adds followers to people it deems important by putting them on the Suggested User List. And last week I learned that there are tons of followers who just follow you to get you to follow back (about 7% in my case). These are mostly fake followers cause they only cared about bumping up their follower numbers, not in listening to anything you had to say (which is provable because if they had listened to me over the years they would have joined FriendFeed cause I’ve talked about that so much that most people think that’s all I’ve talked about lately, which also proves they never watch my videos. Anyway, I digress, only 46,000 out of my now 93,500 followers have come over to FriendFeed, which demonstrates that I have a lot of followers who won’t do anything I ask them to). It’s worse than that, though. Twitter regularly cleans out spammers and such. Last time they did that they restated my follower count as 2,000 lower.
3. Twitter rarely discusses any changes or problems with its APIs with its developers. This is well documented, but doesn’t seem to change much. Developers tell me they are playing footsie with Twitter, trying to build stuff and also get to be friendly with them so that they are picked from the crop instead of their competitors. Think what would happen if Twitter bought or picked, say, TweetDeck. Would Seesmic have the market power to continue as a Twitter developer?
4. Twitter “picks” — at its whim — which companies will get displayed on its home page. Right now I just saw Seesmic displayed there. That artificially gives Seesmic a huge amount of users developers tell me and there’s no way for a company to know when it’ll be picked, or what the rules are. Totally up to Twitter’s team, just like being included on the Suggested User List is. I’ve heard from many that if you beg to be put on either list, too, you won’t get put on and will be blacklisted. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a common enough belief among Twitter developers that the threat of that is probably enough.
5. Twitter has built a system that relies on a third party for functionality. Even now, if we use bit.ly links like Twitter recommends, there’s no guarantee that Twitter will keep those links working in the future if Bit.ly’s investors decide it can’t make money. Since money has NOT started flowing through the Twitter system yet we’re all wondering just how Bit.ly will make money. And that’s before we consider the fact that to really make money Bit.ly would have to do something like what Flickr does: charge us money for access to our old items and/or put some sort of weird advertising into the link (hey, interstitial advertising, if you hated it when the news sites did it, you’ll REALLY hate it when the URL shortener sites do it).
6. Twitter has already demonstrated it will stab both users and developers in the back with no notice (IE, Twitter messes with the marketplace and “picks” winners, both on the user side and the developer side). This is nasty stuff for a platform vendor to do. It makes both users and developers distrust the system and makes investors very skittish about potential risks which are much higher now (you’ve gotta not only build awesome technology, but you’ve gotta take @ev and @biz out to lunch a lot and make sure you do whatever they tell you to do — even then you might get stabbed in the back).
7. Twitter talks trash about a lot of its potential partners as we found out when the Twittergate papers were published by TechCrunch. Yes, do you want to do business with these folks that don’t even have the professionalism to keep their name calling off the Internet? (If I had trouble with a partner I’d NEVER write it down or record it anywhere unless I intended it to be public — I’ve seen too many times when employees go “postal” or leave disgruntled and then leak stuff out).
So, what’s the problem?
Well, add all that stuff to this: whenever you put your data in other people’s, or other company’s, hands you are taking a pretty significant risk. Look at just my Flickr photos. I couldn’t get to any of my old photos two days ago. I couldn’t search for them. I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t navigate to them. Why? Because my pro account had lapsed. This wasn’t something I ever expected when Stewart Butterfield first showed me Flickr. Now Flickr can extort me for money anytime it wants. Why? Because I want my kids and their friends to have access to their childhood photos and I want you to have access to them too. Yes, that taught me a lesson again that I keep learning over and over again. Keep putting them in multiple places. Etc. Etc.
But it’s a lesson we’re learning now with URL shorteners. We are putting an intermediary in the way of all of our links. And Twitter is in control. Worse, what happens if someone hacks into Bit.ly’s servers and redirects everything? What happens if someone at Bit.ly forgets to pay their domain fees and it gets released to spammers? (That’s happened to at least a couple of businesses I know). What happens if Bit.ly’s architecture wasn’t well thought out, or their data center goes down, or or or or.
Being bought by a big company is no guarantee, either. Remember how FeedBurner got slower once Google bought it? (Now it’s getting better, I think, at least the complaints have stopped) And look at how Flickr is treating its users. Oh, and look at how Facebook and Twitter are kicking users off of their service with no advance notice. Just the other day Twitter kicked off a CTO friend of mine. He’s not the only one. I hear about these kinds of things quite often. Facebook does the same, too, and I’m STILL getting comments to the post I made after Facebook kicked me off their system for 24 hours.
So, what do we do? Personally, Dave Winer has some specific things he’d like. Eric Woodward, CEO of Nambu, which is the service that runs tr.im is over there talking about the feedback.
To end this, Woodward says: “The issue is more about having no chance to succeed as success would be defined in this area, and being distracted from ventures where inside connections don’t determine success or failure, which they do on Twitter.”
That wraps up Twitter’s platform shortcomings well. Developers are already distrusting Twitter and are looking for ways to make sure that Twitter can’t stick the knife in their backs. That does NOT bode well for the future of Twitter as a developer platform.
And THAT leaves a HUGE hole open for someone to drive a truck through. Or am I nuts and is this like when Twitter went down almost every day for more than a year and the users didn’t leave?
Time will tell.
