Seems there's excitement in the air over tr.im going open source, and saying that the service can be community hosted. From Mashable:

After weeks of controversy concerning a possible closure of the service, URL shortener Tr.im just announced that it's open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available from now on, in real time. Founder Eric Woodward will spin the project out from his core company Nambu, will cover operational costs personally and will work with anyone who wants to help make Tr.im a community-owned alternative to what Woodward says is a data-hoarding monopoly in Bit.ly and Twitter. Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. The new Tr.im may be the most exciting thing to happen in URL shortening since now market leader Bit.ly itself launched.

Well, one small matter is being ignored here: someone has to pay the hosting and bandwidth bills. Admittedlt, they aren't going to be as huge as those for, say, Twitter - but they won't be non-existant, either. I find the phrase "data hoarding monopoly" especially interesting - where does Mashable think those services are going to find revenue? They haven't made any yet, and tr.im, playing as a "pure as the driven snow" service, ran out of money.

I'm starting to think that most of the people running "web 2.0" businesses need a basic refresher course. Not in anything complex, mind you: they need to start simple, with something like revenue in >= costs out.

Technorati Tags: tr.im, twitter, bit.ly