ReadBurner’s BurnURL adds Mood Mining – Emotional Sharing

URL shorteners appear to be all the rage this week, even passing Twitter for coverage. We took a look at many of the issues with the DiggBar earlier this week and now we have some new updates for BurnURL. BurnURL is a service from the team over at ReadBurner and apparently when ReadBurner re-launches, BurnURL will be integrated into the total package.

The new updates are outlined in their blog post and include:

• consolidated sharing – mostly a usability change but they also note here that to-date they have "burned" 20,000 links
• email sharing – you can now share a link via email with a friend
• Twitter search – this update is pretty valuable – clicking the button will take you to a twitter search where you can browse who is talking about your link (I wonder if they search both the short and the ful url – that would be hot)
• Mood Mining - now you can click emoticons to show your feeling about a story. I like the concept but the issue I have with nearly all rating tools is "what am i rating?" – is it the story, the quality of the writing, the subject, the company mentioned, etc. For example, today I read a story from a blogger where you could tell that the author was mad that the author didn’t get the story first – would I hit the "mad" button here to show support? I think they need to clearly note what it is that I am rating – that goes for all of the rating services online. It looks like they are trying to fix my concerns with their mood mining launch.
• Stats – now they track both unique visitors and page views.

If you haven’t read Danny Sullivan’s in-depth report on URL shorteners, it’s well worth a read. I noted that he didn’t include either BurnURL or DiggBar – probably too new.  Update: Louis Gray has an in-depth review of the changes at BurnURL.