Tag Archives: StumbleUpon

The New StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is transitioning into a new redesign, and changing some things around. The new design is much lighter, and puts the search field in clearer sight.

New StumbleUpon Design

In the post announcing the change, the fourth iteration of the site, they say that their goals are to make things simpler, searchable, and more social. The search has been improved, and now lets you chose to search within your favorites, everyone’s, or your friends’.

It all looks significantly different. The “simpler” part of their mission has certainly been realized. It’s easy to navigate, and there certainly aren’t any unnecessary elements cluttering things up.

The search, too, works as advertised. It’s good at digging-up what you’re looking for, and seems to be heavily weighted towards views/votes.

It will be interesting to see if this drives more people to the main StumbleUpon site instead of just clicking away at their toolbars. I wonder if the iframe toolbar and Su.pr are also partially attempts at doing just that?

StumpleUpon’s “Su.pr” URL Shortener

URL shorteners have been popping up by the dozen lately, or so it seems. Already established sites have been racing to release their own services, and some publishers have even started snapping up short domains to aid the sharing of their posts while retaining some brand recognition.

Now StumbleUpon is trying to get their foot in the URL shortening door with Su.pr. Their service includes basic statistics, like Bit.ly or Tr.im, but they provide a lot of other interesting functionality as well.

Su.pr integrates with Twitter and Facebook, allowing you to compose a message, shorten any URLs you may have in it, and publish to the two sites with a single click. You can even schedule the postings to go up at a later date and time.

Su.pr by StumbleUpon

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Is StumbleUpon Bringing You More Traffic Than Usual?

StumbleUpon is usually my top referrer, but lately it’s been sending a lot more traffic than usual. My stats are higher than ever, and one post in particular is responsible.

If you’ve been reading Webmaster-Source since August of 2007, you may remember an article I wrote called Don’t Block Firefox. I wrote it quickly and got it out the door early, and because it was timely and controversial, I ended up with great results. (In retrospect, I probably could have done a better article, and been a little less sarcastic, but what’s done is done.) If I remember correctly, I wrote the post before lunch, and came back to see the traffic pouring in (because I was testing pMetrics at the time, and playing with the Spy tool). By the end of the day I had some impressive results.

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StumbleUpon 2.0: Where is this Going?

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…

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StumbleUpon Comes to Opera

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.

StumbleUpon: Beyond The “Stumble” Button

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.

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