the popurls blog

i’m happy to announce that popurls has been acquired by tweetup, an idealab company. after more than four years of solo work, i’m thrilled to see popurls become part of a big team and the new possibilities this will open up. for further infos, see the official press release or techcrunch.

special thanks goes to wired mag’s senior maverick kevin kelly whose blog post on popurls in 2006 got it all started.

i got a couple of requests for this: you can now enable an option to have all links on the iphone/android version opened automatically in a new tab instead of going back & forward between sites.

you can now use the .com main site as well as the plain .mobi on opera mini for both, the iphone & android.

a quick note that all popurls sites work pretty well on the ipad in their current layout & design so while i’m obsessive about specific versions for each and every device, there will be no custom site for the ipad — just point it to popurls.com and you’re good to go.

i’m constantly looking for new sources to incorporate into the popurls apparatus so i built a crawler to analyze random public google buzz profiles for 48h. the results are obviously based on a completely non-academic approach but it gives me the sense that the more valuable data, i.e. current news/shared links is (if at all) hidden in private streams as, besides a long-tail of mundane stuff, the most commonly published links only included the usual suspects such as facebook, foursquare and other social media spam (that users are auto-importing from other services).
that being said and for the time being, the data i’m collecting on twitter (also seen on twittersphere.com) is of much higher value when it comes to finding time-critical buzzing stories.
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thanks RWW for picking up the story » discussion here

i’ve just rolled the new content update for march. a couple of new sites now featured on popurls:

[experimental] you can now follow popurls on google buzz – the posted stories are equivalent to the ones on twitter.

quick one: hulu is now a full-featured video block and has replaced msn-video which was discontinued after moving to bing.com.

popurls makes a guest appearance in the epic digg vs. reddit war comic.
read the recent episode in full-size glory »

among several other classics, popurls made it into the guardian’s top sites of ‘09 roundup.