Apparently, StumbleUpon will be throwing the switch on some major changes soon, and changing how users interact with the service. The software toolbar will no longer be necessary (they had better keep it though!), some new options for publishers will be introduced, etc.

On Tuesday night StumbleUpon is changing the way users interact with the service, ditching the need for a software-based browser toolbar in place of a small frame that loads on top of the Web site you’re on. Users with the toolbar installed will still be getting the same experience, but the idea is that anyone can begin stumbling without having to install anything.

To get the Web toolbar to show up in the first place, users must now begin their stumbling experience from the StumbleUpon home page. The site is now broken up into categories. Once you’ve clicked on a link the experience begins, with the persistent toolbar following you from site to site and keeping track of your ratings to provide you with new stumbles.

You can read the full article over at CNET: StumbleUpon 2.0: Good-bye, software toolbar.

I have a few concerns about this… (more…)

The popular social bookmarking StumbleUpon has long caused problems for users of thr Opera web browser. Their lack of a toolbar for Opera has annoyed them for quite some time now. There have been some less than perfect solutions in the past, as well as a very good solution — switch to Firefox — that a lot of the users probably don’t want to do.

Well, there’s another option out now. It’s called Opera Stumbler. It has most of the features of the official StumbleUpon toolbar, but in a menu up on the menu bar instead. It looks like a fairly workable solution, though I haven’t tried it myself yet.

I’m a card-carrying Firefox fanatic, and I couldn’t live without my Firefox extensions, so I doubt I’ll be seeing much use of this for my own purposes, but I know that quite a few of you use Opera (according to Google Analytics). Hopefully you’ll find this useful.

There’s more to using StumbleUpon than just clicking the Stumble button and landing on random web pages. How do you think the pages ended up in their index in the first place? Someone had to submit them first.

Don’t just Stumble. Submit pages, review them, tag them. Do more than just channel-surf, contribute to the community. (more…)