Feel The Web With YooRL – It Is Alive

I have just got to know about a nice new web service named YooRL and the idea behind it really sounds interesting. As a Russian citizen I was also pleasantly surprised by the fact that it was created by Russian developers. I had a small talk to one of the founders of the project.

The idea of YooRL is so simple that you begin to wonder how you have never thought of this yourself (as it always happens with brilliant small innovative ideas). The idea was born when one of the founders sent a link via IM to several friends and received it again the very same day from another person. So they started to think: how does a link travel around the web, what does it life look like? Development took them some time and today the website is ready for you to play in the pre-beta stage as they call it - and promise more features soon.

So what am I so excited about? YooRL basically tracks what happens to a link throughout its life on the web. It means that whenever you share a link to an interesting video or thought-provoking article with a friend of yours it usually initiates a chain reaction and sometimes you even receive the very same link from somebody else and you start to wonder if this person got the link from your chain or from another. And this small website YooRL enables you to track how your link is shared, no matter what people use to share the link - IM, blog, forums, or social networking sites. So YooRL is here to enable you to explore the online resonance your link created. There is also another side to it: you can also explore links that initiated significant buzz on the web via the "Popular" category of the website.

Registration is absolutely simple and only takes a couple of minutes. After confirming your registration you will be able to browse various URLs that have already been added by the currently small YooRL community (you can order them by the number of views they received or by date). You can also browse links in 13 categories, such as Science or Entertainment (the latter one seems to be the most popular one right now). For every link you find interesting you will be able to see details, such as the number of views and comments by users. But the most interesting part is "dashboard". The dashboard for a URL will show you a counter of total views for the link, current number of visitors on a graph, how much time a visitor spends on the website and also views of the URL from around the web on a map. This way you can see how a link propagates and travels around the world in real time. And, honestly, it is fantastic - you actually feel the web, feel the motion and real people. Do give it a try - add your own link, browse links added by other users (there are not so many of them since the project has just been launched), save them as your favorites to track their future and I am sure you will understand why I am so excited.

Currently YooRL looks more like a great new time-waster but I do think that the functionality has a capability of a useful business application, for example business users can track the results of their PR and marketing activities. Honestly, I rarely see any sense in the majority of new startups but this one looks like it will have a bright future because it can be a great place both for entertainment and for business which rarely happens with Web 2.0 projects.