The tr.im URL shortening service has shortened its lifespan: The service will no guarantee redirects for URLs starting 31-Dec-2009, and has disclaimed the reliability of its statistics from this point on.

Tr.im, like other URL shorteners, generates a short unique code that someone can use in place of a full URL. Full URLs often have long sets of words in them for search engine optimization and human readability. These long URLs fall afoul of social media sites which either break these strings funny or, like Twitter, limit text.

CompuServe Classic finally succumbs: CompuServe was one of the very earliest commercial dial-up bulletin board systems, well known for its "CB radio" chat program, which worked much like IRC. I was a CompuServe user back in 1979, with a 9 digit (70000,0000 format) ID. Exciting, heady days when one stuck a phone handset into an acoustic coupled 110-baud modem connected to your character-based 1 MHz computer.

IF you were still a classic user, you can convert your email over.

The Yahoo 360° social networking blog thing, which has been under a death watch for two years, finally dives 13-July-2009: The service is notable for combining blogging and a host of other things, but Yahoo couldn't either figure out how to capitalize it or develop a new service to move content to, despite such a general promise two years ago. Now the service is slated to shut down, and you can migrate any remaining content out. (Thanks, Aristotle!)