Tr.im and Community Ownership

It occurred to me that I haven’t been tweeting as much as usual the past week. I’m about a 5-10 tweet per day blogger on the same range of topics that I discuss here at this blog. That doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been anything to write about and one of the most tweeted stories of the past week was one that has quite a systems flavour to it.

For those in the Twitter world, you probably heard about (even if you didn’t care or follow) the story about Tr.im shutting down and then getting resurrected as an open source, community owned URL shortener. For 99% of the world, this past sentence might as well be written in Klingon. URL shorteners are services that enable you to take a very long web address and shrink it down into something much smaller. For example, the Wikipedia link to URL shorter is included in the last sentence, however the same link might look like this when shortened: http://tr.im/wKxd

Early last week Tr.im’s owners decided it would pack up and quit, citing myriad reasons for dropping its support for the service. Interestingly, this got the blogosphere humming and soon Nambu (its parent) reversed position (of sorts) and declared that Tr.im’s source code would be released and that it would become community owned.

What the Tr.im experience reveals is a lot about the power of collective action in a Web world. Something that could seem relatively benign like a URL shortener quickly became something that was discussed by all kinds of people who previously couldn’t care less about what they used. What might make it even more intriguing is to watch how it moves from a private, closed system to an open one that is decentralized in how it runs as a community-owned entity. What is also interesting is how the term community has been used, yet how it hasn’t been articulated. It will be interesting to see what this ‘community’ looks like, particularly seeing that Nambu’s first option was to sell Tr.im. As a case study in emergence, self-organization and social action, this is one that is worth following — whether you’re a techie or not — because the lessons learned here could mean a lot for other community tools and technologies.