BurnURL has updated its popular ShareBar tool with a few new features and an updated appearance.
URL shortening services all seem to do the same thing by just converting those lengthy URLs into something shorter, and more manageable. When we first covered BurnURL upon its launch last month, we noted how it was bringing a more social aspect to the URL shortening space, and they are improving on that even more with this release.
The first thing you notice is that the up and down voting arrows have been replaced with five emoticons. This is an effort to better reflect how you felt about the article, and you can choose from Boring, Sad, Useful, Funny and Exciting. While more interesting than the old system, I’m not sure why anyone would bother with a Boring rating, but we’ll see how much it gets used.
Next to the emoticons, you’ll see a button for “Tweets” which will show you how many people have Tweeted this particular URL on Twitter.
The sharing button is the next in the line, and while the sharing on services such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg, FriendFeed, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious or StumbleUpon was there in the previous release, they have now been moved to this pop out tab so that the bar is friendlier to those with smaller screen resolutions.
Also inside of the Share tab is now the ability to email the article to other people. As someone who has many “non-techie” friends who don’t spend much time surfing the Web, I am a big user of emailing links, so this is a very welcome inclusion for me.
The last thing is probably more interesting to site owners, but the stats area now shows you the number of unique views for the link as well as the total views.
All in all, some very nice upgrades to an already very useful service, and our favorite choice for URL shortening.
(Disclosure: BurnURL is partially owned by Adam Ostrow with whom I work with at Mashable. This post however was in no way influenced by our working relationship, it’s just a great service)
