360DigitalInfluence

I love popURLs (www.popurls.com) because sometimes it’s fun to be a Web 2.0 voyeur.   Maybe I don’t want to view and forward the latest, snarkiest YouTube video to my friends and colleagues, but I’ll always want to know what YouTube videos are the most watched.  

As a busy mother whose dinner prep involves mid-commute  speed-dialing  Vace Italian Deli for  wood-fired Neapolitan pizza, I appreciate it when someone else has done the hard but thoughtful work for me.   I find myself  a little too busy to visit — or even add  to  my RSS reader — all the cool sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Del.icio.us, ifilm, Wired, BoingBoing, StumbleUpon and Twitter.  I love being able to visit a single page that’s my dashboard for a quick glance at what’s happening. I love popURLs so much that I visit it before my own collection of RSS feeds.    

PopURLs is the mother of all aggregators: it gathers the most popular content from the most popular social sites and displays the info on one nifty page.   According to popURLs founder Thomas Marben, the site is now one of the top 50 sites bookmarked in Del.icio.us.  

I think the interface is fairly elegant – although if you visit the About page you’ll read dozens of impassioned pleas to change the white-on-black background. Yes, the one page is a bit long and requires a good deal of scrolling. However, in as little as 5 minutes I can get through the toplines from 20 or so sites.   The popURLs interface lets  me mouse over the headlines to bring up a small box of additional text.   One more click and it opens the original item in the filter.

Enjoy watching the hive mind. Oh, and check out the Quickies.