In the world of Internet social news there are hundreds of sites that attempt to aggregate all of the most popular stories into one place. Ever since breaking news of important events or natural disasters began pouring out of micro-blogging services, people have jumped on the aggregation bandwagon.

From the creators of ULiken — the nifty Facebook app that lets you compare people, cars, pets and more — comes a site called POPrl.com that tracks the number of clicks its URLs get across the Web and compiles them into one comprehensive social news site.

POPrl initially only worked as a URL shrinking service, but has just recently started to use its knowledge of submitted URLs to create a list of popular news on the Web. Every time someone clicks on a POPrl link about a certain topic, that story moves up in the ranks of hot news on the front page.

Of course, POPrl will only work as a Twitter or micro-blogging style comprehensive news service because it is only used on sites where users are forced to shorten URLs. POPrl found from their beta testing that 86% of their clicks came from Twitter.

The concept of POPrl actually seems like it could overshadow the Digg-style voting system. Poprl is able to follow all the URL redirections and then showcase them on their site as popular news links as they happen.

Although I like the idea of following URLs that have been clicked, and counting them as “digged” or moved up on the popular news list, I am disappointed by the site’s poor presentation. It has a one-page static layout that only lists the top 15 stories. You can’t share them, see who submitted them, or see them updating in real-time.

When it comes to hot Twitter news, a more attractive site with more features, like Twitscoop, will immediately steal my attention. Even the name of POPrl might be conflicting given that there is a similar-sounding application called Popurls, which provides a much more encompassing Web news aggregation service. Until the site undergoes a major renovation, Poprl’s clever and useful service will most likely be overshadowed by more aggressive competitors.

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