Friedbeef’s Tech

StumbleUpon, one of my favourite extensions for Firefox was made available for Internet Explorer earlier this week, making it accessible to the bulk of internet users.

The concept of StumbleUpon is simple:

1. You tell it if you like a webpage by rating it ‘thumbs up’ or ‘down’.
2. It learns what you like based on how you rate your sites
3. It helps you discover or ’stumble upon’ new webpages based on what it has learnt about you

It may seem like a lot of trouble, but StumbleUpon is able to learn fast because it matches your ratings with other users in its database to find like-minded people (which in theory should be interested in similliar pages).It also allows you to narrow down your ’stumbles’ at will, so if you just want to discover pages which are related to technology or art history — you can.

My main issue with most toolbars is that they hog up precious screen real estate. With StumbleUpon, I am able to integrate it into my menubar, so this problem never happens.

StumbleUpon also has a very active community and has a social networking aspect to it, where you can subscribe to other people’s stumbles, add them as your friends, and even read and write a review of a page with a single click so you have a better idea of what you’re looking at.

With 2.3 Million users, and 6 million sites on the StumbleUpon database so far, and with those numbers set to explode now that Internet Explorer is onboard, it looks like surfing the web will never be the same again.

Note: The option to put StumbleUpon in the menubar is not yet functional in IE (Just use Firefox!)

Related Links:

StumbleUpon Testimonials
Tech Crunch Review
Pandora the Intelligent Music Discovery Service

[tags] firefox, stumbleupon, social networking, web 2.0, [/tags]

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