The announcement says tr.im would shut down by the end of the year, and the business model had evaporated.

According to the announcement, growing popularity had resulted in a service that needed “significant development investment and server expansion to accommodate.”

“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 appointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep,” the announcement says.

Services like tr.im convert a long Web address into several characters when it is quoted in e-mails, news stories and other places. It also helps users stay within the 140-character limits when they need to post a message containing a long web address on social-networking sites like Twitter.

But Twitter recently opted to use tr.im’s rival service bit.ly as the default shortener when users post long Web addresses.

“Unless Twitter opens up the option of using more than one shortener, there’s just no way to compete against them.” Tr.im’s co-founder Eric Woodward said in a recent interview. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-08/11/content_11862540.htm