I have been mostly overlooking the URL shortener services provided by various sites until now. My attention was attracted by the proposed shutdown of tr.im site and finger pointing between tr.im and bit.ly. I just realized the service is so simple and works right away as you input the original long URL. It comes free and there is almost no gotcha tricks, such as advertising or banners. It is a good news to users but bad news to the service providers, as I can’t see any way how they can make money from it. Maybe this article sheds some light on this. Because more interesting pages are more likely to be shortened, potentially these enormous data can be processed and refined to provide value-add services.