The wildly popular Firefox extension StumbleUpon released this morning a toolbar for Internet Explorer users. The service lets you browse around web sites that have been recommended by friends and other users with interests similar to your own. Users can also write reviews of sites. The end result is a very compelling user experience that’s likely to explode now that it’s working with the market dominant browser.
Lead by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and Justin LaFrance, the company has received investments from Google board member Ram Shriram, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor and several others. Pages targetted to users in certain locations and demographic groups are displayed at most once to each user and a cost of 5 cents per targeted visitor. Pages for which display is paid are clearly marked.
The company told me that there are now an average of 2.3 million pages viewed through StumbleUpon daily. There have been 2.3 million downloads to date of the FireFox extension and 6 million sites have been reviewed through the system. Fourteen languages are supported. The company was featured in the TechCrunch sponsored Connected Innovators showcase at SuperNova.
This is exactly the kind of thing that’s likely to make the web fun again for many people - and including support for IE is key. I know that I find plenty of high quality content through RSS feeds, TechMeme, Digg, etc. but for most of the world StumbleUpon is going to fill a serious need for group-selected high-quality content and online community. I’m sure I’ll make time to play with it more too.
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It will explode with traffic - already getting sizable amount of visits from them suprised it took so long for them to finally do this.
I have been a user for a while….very addictive. It has been around for years, but has just begun to hit critical mass.
I use SU for a while and LOVED it.
Honestly, I had to remove it because it is SO addictive. If I needed a quick break, I would hit that button. It’s like getting a fix…
Laura
it’s eTour 2.0 or SiteWinder 2.0…
StumbleUpon is a phenomenon. A sleeping giant.
Meet me at http://tex-terror.stumbleupon.com/ to get started.
Just got it. This is addicting. Yes.
The “Stumble!” button isn’t even the best about SU… blogging can be quite nice too if you know a little HTML. (Or CSS: have look at Bossej’s blog to see what’s possible.)
The groups are cool, too. A little anarchistic, though ;]
Hey, that screenshot in the story of the SU profile is me (with longer hair)!
I’m famous! Hurrah.
I thought I was looking at some clever script which had linked to an image of my SU homepage automatically at first, then I realised it was a static image…
George
About time if you ask me, you just can’t shove the dominant browser aside if you are serious about grabbing more people’s attention!
On the otherhand, Stumble is awesome!
I don’t get it. I’ve been using StumpleUpon in IE and Maxthon for at least 2 years, probably longer. This is not new.
I’m a fan of stumbleupon…
I’d be interested to know how much analysis they do for which sites to stumble on and how much its just random. Anyone know if they are doing pretty intensive analysis or just matching by category?
I’m with Jeremy, I have been using it in IE for quite a while (almost a year), not sure why this is news.
What IS news is using it with the RanduMBIzEr (not news because it’s new, but because relatively few know about it). We have a tool at Dumbfind that allows you to one-click submit a site (or page) you are looking at and then we serve you another site that is related. It is sort of like a directed version of Stumbleupon.
They work very well together too. I often stumble and then if I see something I like I will hit the randumbizer to see more stuff like it.
It is also good for research. For instance, I was doing research on venture capital firm and I put in one that was appealing and just hit the randumbizer cycling through other VC’s that were deemed related.
There is a bookmarklet and a toolbar.
http://dumbfind.com/randumbizer/
Its been availibe for IE since the beggining. This was just an overdue upgrade to add the latest features IE users were missing.
Reguardless -great software. The developers are very moral people too and that is all the more reason to support them.
now let’s get an opera version!!
The potential danger here, perhaps, is that the more people discover stumbleupon, the more it becomes like the rest of the web. As the number of users go up, the quality of the ’stumbles’ seems to go down.
But its still an amazing concept for integrating blogging, bookmarking, and community. I’ve enjoyed it immensely.
Been using SU for 5 of the 6 months ive been using the internet,It`s found stuff i`d NEVER have found…..especially being a newbie
I can’t imagine why anyone would be excited about having millions of IE users suddenly rating the StumbleUpon sites — the quality of the experience is bound to go down. What early adopters think is cool is often much more interesting than what the population at large thinks is cool.
Watch out for many more kittens and bears.
There appears to be a fixed list of sites that appear, in order, when you click the Stumble button; if you leave the site and return, you have to stumble through everything you saw before to get to anything new. Given that the idea is to encounter new content, this seems like a bug.
Without knowing how often the list is updated, I have little reason to return. Is there any way to at least randomize the delivery order?
DumbFind is a Great Search Engine, check out our recent web portal. Sprinko.com is a Fun way to search the web for news, images, articles, encyclopedia, dictionary and videos.
Just signed on this weekend
how do you find out how many people stumbled upon you
have fun !