Su.pr, StumbleUpon’s URL shortening service, has come out of closed beta. StumbleUpon, which was recently freed from eBay’s clutches, tossed its hat in the URL shortening ring earlier this year. We first heard about Su.pr in March when StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp Tweeted about it. Su.pr, like other shortening tools, lets you shorten a URL and share it across Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon.
The nifty part of Su.pr’s service is that it gives you a dashboard to help you keep track of how many times your su.pr links have been shared, across which services. You can see how many times each link has been clicked on and retweeted (along with the number of followers for each retweeter). It also lets you schedule shared links across those services for any time you want.
Su.pr’s analytics are similar to those that fellow UR shortening service bit.ly provides, except that Su.pr is connected to website discovery service Stumbleupon, which gives each link an extra distribution push. Links can be voted upon by the StumbleUpon community (which the platform estimates as 8 million users), and if it becomes popular the link can become viral. For StumbleUpon, Su.pr is a way to seed the service with links people are already pushing out to their real-time streams.
Of course, the URL shortening arena is almost over saturated with services. There’s the leader of the pack, bit.ly, TinyURL, Digg’s controversial Diggbar (which helped lift unique visitors by 20 percent), Awe.sm, Un.hub, Link.by, Owl.ly, Post.ly and many more. But Su.pr’s analytics could help the service to be a serious competitor in the URL shortening wars.