One of the reasons why Tr.im decided to initially shut themselves down is because of the monopoly that Bit.ly has for URL shortening services.  Twitter and TweetDeck both use Bit.ly as the default URL shortening services.  Now Google, TypePad, and CBS has embraced Bit.ly for shortening the URLs of their content.

One of the reasons why Bit.ly has become the preferred choice for URL shortening is because of their constant service upgrades.  Last month Bit.ly started to track what links are malicious in content and warns users before sending them to the link.

Within the last few weeks, Google added Bit.ly to Google Reader’s “send-to” feature.  This feature allows anyone using Google Reader to send Bit.ly links on Twitter to their followers.

TypePad added a feature that generates Bit.ly links on Twitter for new blog posts.  Bit.ly statistics have also been added into TypePad’s dashboard.  All TypePad users will see this feature integrated by this fall.

CBS is also launched a new service called cbs.bit.ly.  This service tracks the URLs on CBS’ website that has been shortened and tracks how many people clicked on the shortened links.

John Resig of Mozilla also designed a Retweet button using the Bit.ly JavaScript API.

NewsGator used to have an online RSS reader service, but their market share started slipping away from competitors such as Netvibes, PageFlakes, and Google Reader.  Personally I never really used NewsGator, but I noticed Pulse2.com get a good amount of hits from their RSS reader about one or two years ago.  The company has decided to focus more on desktop applications and enterprise social tools.

On the NewsGator blog, they wrote that users are recommended to migrate to Google Reader by August 31, 2009.  Google employee Brian Shih wrote a welcoming blog post to users migrating from NewsGator to Google Reader yesterday.

As another alternative NewsGator’s desktop applications is one of the most used on the market.  Their RSS reader for the Windows operating system is called FeedDemon. And NewsGator’s desktop RSS reader for the Mac is called NetNewsWire.

Thus far NewsGator raised about $39 million in funding from Mobius Venture Capital and Masthead Venture Partners.