Tr.im not fit

The URL shortening company Tr.im is closing its doors:

After a number of attempts to sell the service, no companies in the Twitter space stepped forward to purchase and operate it in its existing form. Says the company, "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 annointed bit.ly the market winner."

Makes me wonder how many other cloud computing-esque, social media-ish services don't have a strong business model on their own, except if they're owned by one of the chief consumers of that service.