There's a reason tr.im failed, and it's not that "Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner," as they claim on their website. No, guys, it's that tr.im was by far the worst of the URL shorteners. The only thing it had going for it was the minuscule URL; otherwise, it was incredibly slow to load, and often never got there at all.

I'm all for diversity of URL shorteners—that's one reason why I roll my own—but when 90 percent of a service's links never manage to load, well, I'm all for the inevitable evolutionary progress that follows.

In an odd burst of synchronicity, in fact, I just this afternoon found a scribbled Post-it note to myself from July 2:

That's why tr.im failed.

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