YooRL – Feel the Web Right Inside Your Browser

It is my usual pleasure to report on the startups I am particularly fond of. That is why today I will share with you exciting news from YooRL, the web service that permits you to create a special link from any URL and share it with your friends by any means whatsoever to further track how the link propagates on the world map. The small Russian startup provides a totally new way to deal with how you share the links. Where you used to bookmark a link and send it to a group of friends by email or IMs, you are now able to actually track how people visit the website and the best part is that YooRL lets you feel how they share your laugh or grief you yourself feel. That is why my initial testing got me as excited about this tool as I rarely am about anything new I see online.

I think I recommended YooRL to everyone who agreed to listen to me explaining how innovative some ideas are even when you think that no one can invent anything new and everyone is engaged in copying each other's ideas to a certain extent. But no matter how excited I was about YooRL, there was one problem about it: every time I found something worth sharing and tracking on YooRL I needed to go to YooRL website first and create the special link to share there. It was something like del.icio.us or StumbleUpon without the browser buttons that make bookmarking and sharing such a simple process. Today the guys behind YooRL informed me about two great additions to their already very interesting service. First, they have totally updated the design of the website and gave it the usual Web 2.0 look and feel. It is now all smooth and bright and really makes a Web 2.0 addict feel at home (for the previous logo image and screenshot take a look at my first story - you will see this is a drastic change).

But the major update actually solves the problem for people who have too many things on their minds to be able to remember to visit YooRL website every time they want to share something. And naturally it is a toolbar - something that will make the process of creating YooRLs based on any URL you are browsing absolutely simple.

The toolbar supports Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Netscape browsers (which is definitely absolutely sufficient given the latest trend to only support the browser used by the majority of your users). The installation process for Firefox took me a mere couple of seconds. And the toolbar (well, it is actually more of a bookmarklet, I believe) enables me to create a YooRL from any web page I am on. It is so simple and exactly the way it is supposed to be, that I can hardly find anything else to say about it. Whenever you find something you want to share and track, you just click the small "YooRL This" button on your browser toolbar which takes you to the process of creating a YooRL with the URL (for that you will choose the content type, proper category and write a description). And so you are ready to share the link however you want to and track its life using the link's dashboard (it shows the total number of visitors, their distribution on the world map and the current number of visitors).

It is a very valuable addition for me and I know that now I will be using YooRL much more often because it has just become so very simple. It is a great tool for me as a marketing person because I actually need for my work to be able to track efficiency of various promotion activities. But what I know for sure is that YooRL will just have to be integrated into already big social news and bookmarking services, such as Digg or StumbleUpon. And since StumbleUpon is my personal bookmarking favorite I only wish the SU developers will realize what a valuable addition it will be: you simply click the usual Thumbs up or down and the dashboard is automatically generated for the URL so that you can actually track how people visit the website you stumbled. Personally I know that I could have spent hours watching fellow stumblers visit this very page and reply to my own comments about this or that website. That would have been such a perfect addition that I can not understand what they are still waiting for.