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Official ReadBurner Blog

What's Shared on the Web

FRAMED!: What BurnURL is doing to help out Readers AND PublishersApril 11 2009

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

BurnURL’s Upgraded ShareBarApril 4 2009

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

Dear Developers, BurnURL Now Has An APIMarch 4 2009

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>htt

ReadBurner Introduces BurnURLMarch 2 2009

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 st

Hello World, Again. Almost.February 26 2009

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