Woodward had hinted at the move , when Nambu resurrected tr.im just three days after it took the service offline. "If...we don't find someone credible, we'll give it away," he said in an interview last Wednesday, referring to a renewed effort to locate a reputable buyer who would pay his $100,000 asking price.

Today, he elaborated, saying that he had received offers that met his price, but had rejected them. "I had options to sell tr.im for $100,000+, but they were not ideal," Woodward said in his e-mail. "They were sites that wanted to use tr.im to increase their own compete.com numbers by redirecting the tr.im URLs through their own domain name, some wanted to hijack all the links, or they were unknown startups trying to raise their profile."

In his blog post, Woodward again blamed Twitter for making it impossible for URL-shortening services like tr.im to turn a profit. "It is our hope that tr.im can now begin to stand in contrast to the closed twitter/bit.ly walled garden," he said, after also calling the Twitter-bit.ly partnership an "embargo."

Last May, Twitter quietly changed the default URL shortener for its users to bit.ly, having dumped TinyURL.com. According to Woodward, that change doomed tr.im.

John Borthwick, the CEO of Betaworks, the company that started bit.ly, disagreed. "Depending on the day, bit.ly gets 6% to 10% of its traffic directly from Twitter," he said. Borthwick argued that bit.ly is being selected by others, most recently by Google for use in its Google Reader RSS service, not because of any relationship between the companies, but because it's a better shortener.