popurls Launches Democratic Algorithm And Other Republican Features

popurls, the original social aggregator has launched a variety of new features this weekend. popurls is so popular that the King of Clones, Guy Kawasaki has cloned it for his latest startup. From a developer standpoint, popurls has some nifty features like the ability to swap opening links in other windows, text sizing and css changes on the fly.

The major update is the addition of the "poprank algorithm" which features the top nine stories across the popurls community. Founder Thomas Marban notes regarding the algorithm, "tracks popularity on the basis of several measurement methods across the web". I have a call-in to Austria to get the secret sauce from Marban but somehow I doubt I will get very far.

Other newly launched features include:

• Direct sharing on facebook
• Screensaver for windows
• Improved search
• Pownce bot
• New feeds
• Updated iPhone client

I keep a tab open for popurls and a tab for Original Signal and both attack the aggregator issue a bit differently.