With all the talk out right now about URL shorteners (especially those that frame content), we thought we’d take just a moment to let you guys in on some of the steps we take to help publishers of content that’s spread through BurnURL (and eventually ReadBurner).

We’ve always been a very publishers focused company (both with Readburner and BurnURL) and we intend to keep it that way.  We, from the very creation of BurnURL, wanted to make sure the focus was on publishers and their content versus on us and we’ve put quite a few steps in place to do that.

One of the changes we recently put live was to remove the Sharebar when we detected the user-agents of Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask (these four account for the largest portions of search traffic).  These crawlers don’t need to see the Sharebar (as they’re not going to interact wtih it), so we don’t need to serve it to them.  Instead we feed them a 301 redirect.  This tells them the URL that was burned is the original content owner and it should be listed in the index on that topic.  Our shortened URL effectively gets ignored.

I’d also to reiterate that being a publisher focused company, we love getting feedback from publishers.  Or even users in general.  We strive with our products to provide a great experience, but if you think there’s something we can do to make it even better- we’re listening.  Feel free to email us or send us a reply or DM on Twitter.  We’re heavily listening to what you have to say.

While the redirect is only a little feature that we’ve put in place to help you, we’re always adding more and tweaking things with BU.  We’ll be giving a glimpse on some of those changes or features via the blog over time in hopes of creating a very transparent environment for BurnURL.

We were stoked to see that BurnURL is included in the new Shorten URL Firefox add-on!

Shorten URL from context menu with your selected URL shortener service and display the result in location bar.

Give it a download and Burn some links right from your browser!

First off, we want to say thank you to everyone who has really supported the ReadBurner team over the past…wow, year or so now? It has been an awesome ride. We’re just getting started.

We listened to feedback, and we’ve paid attention to the landscape of the web and how we interact with news and information. We saw a lot of problems and gaps there. Ways to maybe do things better, and more efficiently.

You’re getting a glimpse of that today with version 2 of BurnURL.

What happened to “Like”?

We gave you the ability to “Like” things via the BurnURL ShareBar in the first version. But…what does “Like” mean anyways? Does like mean you like it enough to give it a “Like” or does it mean you REALLY like it? Or does it mean, it’s kinda ok, and you don’t hate it?

You have no idea what it means, and neither did we.

Are we competing with Digg?

No. Digg is a whole other animal. See comments on “Like”. What is a Digg? Some people “digg” things to bookmark it for later viewing, or for a small subset of their friends. Some use it to promote things to get it to a homepage. What is a “Digg”? We have no idea.

What’s with the weird emoticons on BurnURL?

Since a “Like” and a “Digg” are way too generic and not so helpful when aggregating votes based on “all or nothing” interaction, we wanted to broaden that. And we didn’t want to do it with a star system. Is 3 stars “kinda good”? Is 1 star “awful”? We have no idea.

By giving you 5 very descriptive emoticons with details, we’re allowing you to share the mood that the burned URL may have put you in. Sure, maybe you didn’t get extremely mad, but for the sake of rating, it doesn’t matter.

What we’ve found is that even though a “digg” and a “like” is very easy to do or not do, asking you to ponder 5 options is even better.

Why?

Mood Mining.

By asking you to take a moment longer to assign your mood to a burned item, you’re giving data back to the community, the publisher, and to us at ReadBurner that we can “mine” through with some new techniques we’re tinkering with, and thus spit out something really awesome.

More of a “pulse” of what news is hot, what news is REALLY hot, and what news is just plain funny, or what news is really pissing people off.

Mining that mood data is infinitely more interesting than a digg or a like. Do we have the adoption or traffic that a Digg or a site that has likes have? No, not yet. And even so, the community that we do have are now rating things and giving us data that’s way more important than a simple share. 10 shares is NOT as interesting as 3 people saying something is “exciting” with BurnURL.

I will be writing more about how I feel Mood Mining will not only set us apart from the pack of share collectors, but will help you understand how a community of content readers like yourselves FEEL about what they’re reading.

Stay tuned folks.

_drew

PS, check out some posts about todays release, and tell us how it made you feel:

CenterNetworks - http://burnurl.com/Zmlwqg

Louis Gray (our advisor) - http://burnurl.com/ErGCqy

After about a month or so of watching people use BurnURL - and more than 20,000 BurnURLs directing more than 200,000 hits - today we’re rolling out a new version of our ShareBar.  We’ve both made the design more efficient, and added a number of features we think you’ll find useful.  Here’s the rundown:

1. Moved Sharing to “Share” Button: After seeing all of the reviews and screenshots of BurnURL, it was clear that we needed to save some space on the ShareBar for those with smaller screen resolutions.  So we consolidated the sharing options – like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg – under the new “Share” button.  This will also give us more room to add additional services – let us know which you’d like to see added.

2. E-Mail Sharing: Under this new “Share” button, there is now an “E-mail” option so you can send stories to people via e-mail.  E-mail sharing is still by far the #1 way people share stuff online, so we thought it would be a good idea to include it with BurnURL.

3. “Tweets” Button: This new button initiates a Twitter search for the URL you’re viewing.  This lets you know who else has tweeted the story, and what they said about it.  This is just the first of a number of ideas we have when it comes to integrating community into the ShareBar.

4. New “Mood Mining” Rating System: One thing we’ve noticed is that with a simple up/down rating system, people aren’t really expressing their thoughts on the story itself, but rather, its context (i.e. – “bad news” got lots of votes down, even if it was an important/useful story).  So, we’re trying something totally new, using emoticons for voting.  This way, those who follow your BurnURL’s can let you know if they found your link interesting, funny, useful, boring, or sad (have other ideas?  let us know).  We think this data could also be interesting as we prepare for re-launching ReadBurner soon.

5. Stats: We now track two stats: unique views and total views.  Just click on the link to toggle between the two stats.  We realize that a lot of people choose URL shorteners based on the analytics they provide, and this is one area we plan to beef up on in the future.

All of these updates are now reflected on URLs that have been burned in the past, and all of those that will be burned in the future.  We’re really excited about these changes, and look forward to your feedback!  

Today has been a very humbling day for us and our BurnURL project.  This morning, we were alerted to the story of Team Winter, an effort setup by Athletes for a Cure to honor the memory of Michael Vinecki. 

Michael passed away this morning from prostate cancer, leaving behind his 9-year-old daughter Winter, who happens to compete in triathlons at her young age.  We caught wind of the story when it was tweeted by Scott Zagarino, using a BurnURL, this morning (we’ve been monitoring all tweets containing BurnURLs since launch for feature ideas, bugs, etc.).

In any event, as I’m writing this, the Team Winter page has been hit nearly 800 times, and retweeted close to 100. Meanwhile, the guestbook setup to leave Winter condolences and best wishes has been signed dozens of times.

We just wanted to share this story, and are thankful any small part we might have been able to play in making the outpouring of support for Winter and her family possible during what is a very difficult time.

_teamrb 

Realizing developers may want some easy access to BurnURL, we’ve pushed live our first implementation of an API today.  As time goes and we get more feedback from developers, we’ll continue to add more features.  Currently, we’re enabling three output methods through the API - XML, JSON and plain text (with plain text being the least featured).  As a developer, you’ll be able to simply choose which output format you prefer and get all results in that format.  A guide on each format and what to expect follows below.

Basics

• The BurnURL API is accessed via simple GET parameters being passed.  The most important being “url”, which is the URL needing to be burned.  The second parameter is “output” which is the format you’d prefer to receive back (XML, JSON or plain text).
• A sample API call would look like this - http://burnurl.com/?url=google.com&output=JSON which would burn “google.com” and return the results in JSON format.

Notes

• output parameters are not case sensitive. ‘JSON’,'json’, ‘jSOn’ and ‘JSon’ all return the same output results.
• the url passed can either include or not include the “http://”.  If it wasn’t included, we’ll add it in.

XML
Sample Call URL - http://burnurl.com/?url=google.com&output=XML
Results
<burn>
<burnURL>http://burnurl.com/6KynAt</burnURL>
<origURL>http://google.com</origURL>
<title>Google</title>
<burnkey>6KynAt</burnkey>
<error>none</error>
</burn>

burn - XML container for the burned results
burnURL - The new burned URL for the URL passed
origURL - The url that was passed
title - The title of the page passed
burnkey - The unique key used for that URL
error - Will be “none” if there was a successful burn

Error Results
<burn>
<error>banned</error>
</burn>

burn - XML Container for the burned results
error - The reason the URL was not processed

JSON
Sample Call URL - http://burnurl.com/?url=google.com&output=json
Results
{”burnURL”:”http:\/\/burnurl.com\/efDbZp”,”origURL”:”http:\/\/google.com”,”title”:”Google”,”burnkey”:”efDbZp”,”error”:”"}

burnURL - The new burned URL for the URL passed
origURL - The url that was passed
title - The title of the page passed
burnkey - The unique key used for that URL
error - Will be empty if there was a successful burn

Error Results
{’error’:'banned’}

error - The reason the URL was not processed

Plain Text
Sample Call URL - http://burnurl.com/?url=google.com&output=plain
Results
http://burnurl.com/CW431L

Includes only the new BurnURL URL

Error Results
error

Returns only that there was an error, but not what the error was.

If you need further help with the API or would like to implement BurnURL in another way with your application, please email us.

One of the first feature requests to roll in after pushing BurnURL live was the ability to share stories on your favorite social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg right after burning a URL.  Today, we’ve pushed this feature live. 

Just burn a URL either from the homepage or our bookmarklet and along with your new URL, you’ll see icons from which you can share stories on the networks we support.  Let us know what you think, and also let us know if there are additional services you’d like to see us add here and on the Sharebar.

Today we’re excited to unveil BurnURL, a new service from ReadBurner that makes it easy to share content across the Web.  At face value, BurnURL might look like yet another URL shortener, which, truth be told, it is.  But we think it also sets us back on course to do what we’ve always wanted to with ReadBurner, which is make it easy to share content, organize it in meaningful ways, and ultimately provide publishers with tools to grow their audience.  Let us explain.

What BurnURL Does

Like other link shorteners, BurnURL lets you take a long URL and turn it into a short one, in the form of http://burnurl.com/bFuAHm.  You can do this either on the homepage or by using our bookmarklet, which lets you “burn” a URL from anywhere.  Short URLs fill an increasingly big need on the Web, as people share links on character-limited services like Twitter and Facebook, in email, and over IM.  

When you click a BurnURL, the experience is a bit different than most shorteners.  You’ll see what we call the “ShareBar,” which includes convenient links to share the story on popular social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg, a hit count showing how many times the link has been visited, and options to vote the story up or down and see the overall rating from visitors.  As you can imagine, all of these actions and data points create an opportunity to do lots of interesting stuff, and get back to something similar to the original ReadBurner.

What’s Next?

We’ve got a number of other ideas about building a URL shortener that provides publishers with value, and in the coming weeks, you’ll see several additional features that do this.  Additionally, we’ll be taking a close look at the data derived from the ShareBar and start plotting the new ReadBurner.com.

Meet Our New Team

We’d also like to take this opportunity to share some business news with you.  Back in January, we (Drew and Adam) welcomed Mike Davis and Jason English to the ReadBurner team.  Mike and Jason are the founders of IHeartMovies.com, and as part of the deal, we’ll be working on their project as well.  We’ve made some exciting progress over there in the past couple months, including implementing Facebook Connect, and have some really exciting things planned for the future.  You can keep up with IHM on the blog and twitter feed.

Let Us Know What You Think

We’re excited to be back online, and look forward to providing you with a consistent stream of updates on our progress.  We’d love to know what you think about BurnURL, and your ideas as to how we can provide a more valuable service to content sharers everywhere.  Let us know what you think in the comments, by emailing info@readburner.com, or hitting us up on Twitter.

We’re coming close to giving you a peek at the new ReadBurner.

Originally we were going to launch a hybrid of Twitter+Flickr+YouTube with glittery backgrounds ala MySpace, but we’re pretty sure someone is doing that.

Joking aside (for a second), working on ReadBurner has been really rewarding, even when things weren’t going swimmingly.  Why?  We have a team in place now that I personally am proud to be working with.   Very smart and very driven.

People say that it’s the worst time to start a business right now, and I disagree.   It’s always the worst time to start a business.   YOU have to make it the best time by creating something that adds value, taking part in the conversation and not sitting back on what you’ve created and believing your own hype.

We’ve done all of that.   We’ve listened.   We’ve worked hard.

We will make this the best time.

Burn it up baby!

_drew