Thomas Marban is the creator of Popurls. Currently he is the CEO of celum IMAGINE. Visit his portfolio here.

What is popurls, and how did it come about?

The intention for popurls was to get a quick glance on what’s happening on the web while keeping my serious newsreader clean from short-term headlines that i wouldn't be able to track anyway. The idea wasn't new as I was engaged in similar services since the early days of RSS, figuring out how to get a time efficient overview of relevant industry news. The difference at this time was to create an Infotainment site consisting of the most popular social new sites on the web to reflect the hive mind and give the masses a tangible understanding of the power of content aggregation. It took about a day for the first version to design and implement it and i sent it to a bunch of friends shortly after. Two days later it appeared on the frontpage of digg and del.icio.us and became an overnight hit. Half a year later the concept has created a new trend in, as Steve Rubel calls it, "Single Page Aggregators" with lots of sites doing the same thing with various adjustments. The thing that popurls was and will always be different (besides being first to mind) is to offer customization only on the presentation layer and not the types of sources as i don't want to offer the n-th feed reader. Letting the user decide every single aspect of a service is probably an indication for not knowing what they really want, so the well-selected mixture of the most popular sites presented in an appealing design is what the brand stands for. In other words, Andy Warhol's manifesto applied to web 2.0 ;)

What are your plans for the service?

As I'm an entrepreneur in the B2B software field, popurls is a contrast hobby to stay in touch with the community and establish contact with lots of interesting and well-known people from the web industry. Especially as I'm located in Europe where the social web is still in a rather notional stage with the lack of a broad audience. I will keep up offering the best buzz aggregator and gate to the social web, that's the goal.

What goes into running Popurls?

I'm working on it alone (with one server) and there are hardly any efforts on the tech side in day-to-day operations. Right now it takes about half an hour a day, talking about cooperations and replying to user feedback - that's what I love so much about it.