At a glance, both looks exactly same. I believe menu-bar icon should provide information fast, but now I have to stop and look carefully what actually is in this small blue circle: Is it a number or a question mark?
Until recently, there was purple icon for unknown and blue icon for known states, which was a lot better in my opinion.
But I want to go further and ask: Why even show a badge for unknown state? What purpose does it serve? And if there is a real need for showing unknown state, why showing it in a smilar fashion with known state? I mean, why not differentiate it with completely different visuals like animations Google Drive and Dropbox?
The question mark implies “error” or “not found” or “indeterminate operation”. I’ve come to just ignore the Hook icon in the menu bar because it’s not telling me anything useful.
My suggestion would be to have the menubar icon configurable with with a color of our choice which means “Hook found links”. Otherwise, just show black or grey. I don’t need to be told how many links are found, that’s irrelevant in the icon since I’ll just open Hook and see for myself.
