popurls Archive

Thomas Marban of popurls has launched his first Google App Engine application today. Named Readbag, it’s a simple way to save links to view later on your mobile or other computers. It appears to be a slim version of Delicious with as simple an interface as possible.

There’s a bookmarklet to make saving links one click and a read-only API for mixing up the app as you wish. After you read a link, it goes into the archive and you can select to have the system email you daily with new links you have saved.

The only addition I can think of initially is a way to export your saved links and maybe a send to friends option. But the latter enhancement might make the app more than it’s intended for.

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.

Web aggregator popurls has launched a real-time viewer mashup with Google Maps. It displays a map of the world plus the content being clicked on from popurls. It's pretty groovy to watch what people in different countries think is interesting. My suggestions would be to let users select a zoom level as currently it's pretty far zoomed out and a pause button. They could also offer a country-by-country analysis, select "Germany" and only watch the clicks from with Deutschland.

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