This is in no way ‘new’ news as StumbleUpon (SU) has been around since 2001. Although unlike many other community-based sites the take up has not been as rapid – after four years Facebook has 63million active users compared to SU’s 5.5million.
Having said that, SU is unlike other community-based sites. Like all good sites, I discovered this not by surfing the web but after it was recommended to me; and therein lies the beauty of SU. In short, SU delivers pages matched to your personal preferences that have been either explicitly recommended by your friends or by one of 5.5million other users who share similar interests.
I won’t go into how this works as you can check it for yourself. Instead I will ask you this, when was the last time you looked at page 10 or even page 45 of a search that has yielded 1.8million results? Never is an acceptable answer. That is because we are generally led to believe that the most relevant results will be on the first page; but marketers pay good money and spend a lot of time developing their websites to ensure that their’s appears at the top of a Google search result.
In comparison, ’stumbling’ allows you to discover sites that your peers have suggested to be more relevant to your particular interests. It then learns what your likes/dislikes are in order to deliver even more relevant information in the future.
If only for a bit of fun, this is an exciting way of discovering content on the web.
