Rippla has today launched as a site to track how news stories are shared via social media.

Take a look at the home screen and you will see stories generating the most shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and bit.ly.

The site has been created by journalist and political blogger Sunny Hundal who told Journalism.co.uk Rippla “scrapes news feeds from the UK’s 10 biggest news sites and then ranks them by popularity across social networks. It measures how many ‘ripples’ they’ve created.

The second great feature of this site is the widget, which allows you to enter the URL of a news story from your site and see the social media “ripples” it has created.

Hundal said he created the site for two reasons:

First, I want to track how well media organisations do on social media. The site updates and collects the data every hour.

Second, the longer term aim is to provide people an opportunity to consume content based on what their peers are sharing / reading, rather than simply based on what the newspaper front-page offers. As you know, patterns of media consumption are changing and we think this is the way its all heading.

The site will be in beta for some time while bugs are fixed and functionality is added.