I’m su.pr thanks for asking.

If you use Twitter, you know all about URL shorteners by now. In fact, you can probably name more of them, then the real name of your twitter followers.

StumbleUpon recently released their own. What makes this one any different then all the others? Before we get there:

What is StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is another social site, but really its not a networking site. You can make friends and have a profile, but really it’s similar to Digg in the way that the social network is not as important as the tool itself.

Lets face it, StumpleUpon is for when you are bored. You make a profile and tell it what you like, and then you stumble. It sends you to a random site, based on your taste.

What does this have to do with your short URL?

su.pr has a lot of benefits over other sorts of tiny urls. From a marketing perspective, it is uber trackable. After you make a link it tells you how many times the link was clicked and how many people re-tweeted it. This might not be useful for everyone, but it helps you know what kind of tweet or post worked the best to get click throughs.

The other nice part is it lets you promote a website through the tool. Once someone clicks your link, they are brought to the site and have a su.pr bar on the top, like pretty much any social site you click off of, but it also has a bar on the right. This bar on the right shows the most popular stumbles from the sites that you have chosen to promote.

Another big advantage su.pr has is that you can post right off of the su.pr site to facebook, twitter, or both at once if you are feeling especially lazy.

Domain URL’s

More exciting than all of that is the fact that they are going to be setting up a system so you can have a tiny url with your own domain. So in other words in the future I might be able to have, http://briancarl.com/abcd. Although this might not be practical if you have a longer url, it keeps you website and brand in the forefront, so people know what they are clicking.

Domain hosted shortners are going to be the next big land rush for web url’s.  Look for xb.ox, app.le, ma.sh, and other tech companies starting the trend in the near future.

Should I Switch?

Here is the long answer. If you already do your shortening at the shorteners url, then I would. If you are using thirdparty software, like tweetdeck, then it’s more of a question. Is having to open up a new tab in Firefox worth it to you? How often are you going to check those stats? Does the website your trying to promote relate to the links you are posting?

Here is the short answer. yes

p.s. su.pr is still in beta you need a beta code to get into it. They release some evey once in a while. Everytime I have seen it the code has been suprbeta.