This shutdown was also not born out of any bitterness towards Twitter. While we are disappointed that users cannot choose their URL shortener, that is Twitter’s decision to make. We are simply accepting the business reality of the situation, and moving on. Life is not fair, and such is life as a Twitter developer (which none of us here will be any longer). We are all actually excited at pursuing larger opportunities, of which there are many.

Which is all well and good for Nambu, the company behind tr.im. But it really stinks if, like me, you enjoyed their service and lost access to all of your great charts and stats that revealed who was clicking on the links in your tweets. Basically, Nambu concluded that because the information is out there for everyone, their service didn’t offer anything that others couldn’t offer. But I, and many others, disagree. The stats I could get out of tr.im were far superior to what Bit.ly, tinyurl or ow.ly from Hootsuite provide me (in terms of the look and feel). They were client-ready charts and graphs that provided geographic locations of those who clicked on links, and the browser and operating system they used. And that was hugely valuable to me (see clicks to Olympus E-P1 Blendtec Will It Blend video).

But the story gets even better. Having died on a Sunday, tr.im was resurrected in the same week and reports of its revival by popular demand are flooding the blogosphere. Now, according to the latest reports, it is going open source.

Who really knows how long tr.im will last? But the bigger issue is that all URL shorteners are just like remora “sharksucker” fish living off the shark that is Twitter (or the Fail Whale that is Twitter). Unless Twitter decides to get real about the businesses that are migrating to its service, and seamlessly incorporates the same sort of Facebook Insights analysis that make Facebook so useful for marketers, the Darwinian shakeout of URL shorteners will continue. For now, I am happy that tr.im wasn’t trimmed permanently, but I feel a little bit like a sucker fish myself.