Tr.im is one of the most popular URL shortening services for social networking sites such as Twitter. This popular service has now announced the initial release of their backend code as a new open source project on Github.

Unfortunately for Tr.im users, they announced that they would be shutting down by the end of the year. However, the team has made the wise choice of continuing their efforts as a community supported open source project. The best news is that that the Tr.im team will release all of their code under the MIT license and offer developers uninterrupted, real time access to all the link-map data associated with Tr.im urls.

The guys at Tr.im have now made available the first two modules on the Github page so that developers can now get a copy of the code and start working on it. The final Tr.im website module will be released in a few days. The team also cautions those who wish to play around with the code that some bug fixes are still pending and that the authentication and login system needs updating. The Tr.im blog also states that they plan on donating the tr.im domain name to a third party that will hold it in trust for the sole use of the Tr.im project.