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?

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.

The service integrates with StumbleUpon. As their site says, “Su.pr is the only URL shortener that also helps your content get discovered.” Shortening a link with Su.pr puts it into the StumbleUpon system, which has proven itself to be a souce of quality traffic in fairly large quantities.

There’s a bookmarklet available, and an API, though there doesn’t seem to be any developer documentation quite yet. I look forward to having Su.pr integrate with desktop Twitter clients like Tweetie and Twhirl.

As if that wasn’t interesting enough, Josh Lowensohn of CNET’s Webware blog reports that:

Soon [Su.pr] will also let publishers use the shortening service while maintaining domain branding. So instead of using su.pr/XXX, I could set it up to use cnet.com/XXX. It will also be able to be inserted into your site’s code, so that each URL you link to is automatically shortened. It does this while maintaining a special domain re-direct that allows search engines to pick up on those source links, even though they’ve been shortened.

The service is currently invitation-only, as it only recently launched, but you can find codes in the Webware post and more may find their way into the major tech blogs soon. (Hopefully the site will make it’s public launch soon and eliminate the need for an invitation code…)

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.

The traffic from the first day was amazing, but the best part was it never went away completely. Over time it’s decreased, but I always had a steady stream of hits on that post since.

Lately, though, the post seems to have had a resurgence in popularity. 52% of my traffic currently is going to Don’t Block Firefox. My traffic is up, higher than it’s ever been, and that one post is the one bringing in the new visitors.

Why is this happening, though? Did StumbleUpon change their algorithm recently, and start favoring “classic” submissions, or has the post just been discovered again by the Stumblers? Other posts on StumbleUpon seem to be up a little, but nothing so dramatic.

Have you noticed an increase in traffic from StumbleUpon lately?

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…

• While they say “Users with the toolbar installed will still be getting the same experience,” can they assure us that they will never drop toolbar support? It’s what makes the service unique, and a frame-based page (frames, really? This is 2008!) can’t even hope to be as functional. And the toolbar should not be de-emphasized in any way.
• What about pages with JavaScript designed to nuke frames? Plenty of sites detect when they’re being loaded in a frameset and bust out of it. This is really the first thought that popped into my mind after I realized they weren’t killing the toolbar (which just wouldn’t make sense for them to do, really).

To me it seems like they’re trying to a) drive more traffic to StumbleUpon.com, probably so they can better monetize the service, and b) help out the publishers a bit by spreading the stumbles around more.

I think that their changes will really improve the service, and get more people Stumblin’.

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.

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

Submitting

Keep the StumbleUpon toolbar ready when you browse the web normally. Find something you like? Click the Thumbs-up button, like you do when you’re using the Stumble button. If someone else already submitted the page, it will just fade to gray when you click it, and that’s all. You’ve added another vote to the page. If you’re the first to discover the page, a new window will open with a form to fill-out.

Clean-up the Title field, if it’s full of extraneous rubbish. You just want the post/page title here, not the site’s name, or anything. Next, write a couple sentences about the page in the Review box. While you can get away with leaving the Review field blank, I highly recommend filling it out. Select the most appropriate topic, and hit the Submit This Site button.

Reviewing

If you go to yourusername.stumbleupon.com, you will be presented with your StumbleUpon blog (or StumbleBlog as I call it). Every review you leave will be shown here, along with a link to the page you reviewed. This means your friends can see what you like online, and it makes it easy for you to find things you Liked in the past.

How do you leave a review? If you’re submitting a site, then there’s a prominent Review field ready, but what if you’re just another up-voter? The toolbar has a word-bubble-shaped icon that, when clicked, takes you to a page that lists all the review of a page. In addition to seeing what others said about the page, you can leave your own review. Get in the habit of reviewing pages you and may want to come back to, or you think others may be interested in.

Tagging

The toolbar has yet another icon, shaped like a price tag. By clicking this, you can add a few tags to a page.

Tags define a page, making it possible to do neat tricks, like only Stumbling pages with a certain tag.

You don’t need to go crazy, tagging every page in sight, but this is yet another thing that may help you, or someone else, find the page again.

Channels

StumbleUpon is often compared to idly flipping through channels on a television. If you use StumbleUpon’s Channels feature, it’s more like flipping through a years worth of shows on a single TV channel.

Make sure either Channels, or the tidier Channels Menu, is turned-on in your Toolbar Options. By selecting a channel, you can Stumble through pages that are only from The Onion, only from Wikipedia, only from YouTube, only in the Internet Tools topic, etc.

Send To

Pretty much web user has, at some point or another, emailed a link to someone they know. It’s a bit fo a hassle, though. You have to copy the URL, trek over to your email client, start a new message, paste the URL in, and write a short note to explain why you’re sending the link.

StumbleUpon can help you here. By enabling the Send Top feature in the Options window, you can easily share pages via a convenient menu. Your StumbleUpon friends are automatically in the list, and you can send to any email you want. Your friend will receive an email from StumbleUpon containing your username and the link (as well as a big “Pass it on button”).

StumbleUpon has a lot of features that are overlooked by many users. Check-out all the buttons on the toolbar, and poke around in the Toolbar Options screen. See what SU has to offer.