Just wanted to take this moment to thank StumbleUpon (SU) for helping me to discover thousands of hmm-inspiring pages. I doubt many readers haven’t at least tried SU and I’ve found a good amount of material to write about here using the service.

Whether or not you like serendipitous surfing, SU helps you explore (possibly) unchartered web waters. That’s a good thing.

Google tried to copy, comes up short
For those using the Google Toolbar, in April of this year they released a similar stumbling-type feature as an add-on button by clicking the dice icon which hasn’t caught on yet. Perhaps because there is more to SU than stumbling sites. You can form and/or participate in groups. I started the Blogs ‘R Us group at SU years ago and it now has over 1,400 members. Conversely with the Google toolbar all you can do is bookmark the page.

One strength of the Google Toolbar over SU is the ability to create your own button add-ons, so it would be possible to add more SU social-type features. Would be nice to see StumbleUpon add some sort of API/plugin structure to their toolbar.

History
Back on January 18, 2004 I joined the site StumbleUpon, then a Canadian startup, today owned by eBay. Unlike Skype which has less synergy with eBay, you’d expect StumbleUpon would have more auction-related functionality. Stumble auctions button at least? Not yet. Also missing is the ability to add Stumble-thru to your own site. Matt created a random posts Wordpress plugin but that’s not related to the page you’re on (there’s a good idea for an improved SU-type Wordpress plugin).

After taking nearly four years to thumbs up 2,500 pages, I’m reflecting on how I’m still using Stumbleupon today. Customer (yes, I sent them a few bones for sponsorship, have you?) longevity is one of the greatest compliments for any product/service. I know a lot of webmasters like SU because they get extra traffic from people stumbling their pages, but the wave of webmasters and bloggers selfishly filling SU with too many subpar blog posts has damaged the quality of the service somewhat over the last year. No offense to bloggers who use SU non-selfishly, but I liked using SU better when it wasn’t used by as many bloggers, when it wasn’t part of eBay.

With that said, the good still outweighs the bad with this service. Thank you again, Stumbleupon.

Update 3:45pm PST: After an hour or so of dice button pushing in the Google toolbar I reached this screen:

That’s right, there’s a limit to the number of dice searches in the Google Toolbar. I’ve reached a wall with keywords in StumbleUpon before, but that’s never happened with the “all” category.

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