In a move that will once again lead some to question to longevity of the URL shorteners used to shrink links on sites like Twitter, the popular Cl.igs service has announced on its blog (via CenterNetworks) that it is shutting down.

The service has tens of thousands of users and directs tens of millions of URLs per month. The site’s founder writes:

On Sunday, 25 Oct 2009 at 12:00:00 GMT, the service will stop accepting new short URLs and will stop logging analytics.

The forwarding data will be retained so that forwarding can continue for at least till the end of November; after that, there are no guarantees as to how long the service will continue to forward the short URLs to their destinations….Shortly (in a few days), I’ll be deploying a mechanism to export your data. It is almost done and just needs a bit more testing before I’m comfortable releasing it.

The service cites costs and time spent on customer service as major factors for the closedown, plus the challenge of monetization. Another likely factor: Bit.ly, as the default URL shortener on Twitter, is currently on a roll and pushing out many of its smaller competitors.

It’s worth noting, however, that Cl.igs is a member of 301works, a group which aims to prevent broken URLs when services shut down. Is there hope, then, for our Cl.igs URLs?

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