Without Tr.im Will The Web Suffer?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Chris Crum at WebProNews reports that URL shortening service Tr.im is closing shop. Then he asks, “What about all those URLs … what will happen to them?” Well, that’s a paraphrase, but it’s a very good question.

Think about an even scarier situation. What if Twitter lost its marbles completely. The recent denial of service attack proved that there is a weakness. What if the service died completely. What then? What would happen to all of those links, mostly short URLs?

If a major event caused a lot of short URLs to no longer work then many webmasters would lose loads of traffic. That traffic could be significant in search engine rankings for some of those sites. While the links themselves don’t pass on any link popularity or trust factor juice, because Twitter no follows its links, the traffic that comes from those links – if it is quality traffic that sticks around – probably does affect the search engine optimization efforts for many sites. This could be a problem.

Chris Crum says it needs to be discussed and a solution needs to be offered. I agree. Perhaps it’s time for Twitter to get its own URL shortening service. Perhaps there needs to be a service that automatically picks up short URLs from defunct companies and keeps them alive. What’s your solution?