Reddit, Digg, and Del.icio.us are three good examples of social bookmarking sites. In these sites, users submit web pages that they find interesting, enraging, or newsworthy, and based on the number of hits and positive ratings, the submitted link ascends in popularity. The page is then discussed by registered users. These three sites posess some of the key virtues of Web 2.0: they’re interactive, they allow feedback from users, who can then befriend each other etc.
To someone with my notoriously low attention-span and morbid love of surprises, none of these sites, nor their concept, quite appealed to me. Then I found StumbleUpon, which I later discovered to be nothing more than Web 2.0’s crystal meth.
StumbleUpon can be the same as Reddit, Digg, or Deli.cio.us. Stumble’s concept is the same as the other three: users find intriguing sites, submit them, and users rate them.
The fun part is what users call “stumbling.” When you sign up for Stumble, if you’re using a supported browser (Firefox, IE, Opera), Stumble adds a new icon to your toolbar. This is the Stumble button. Before being allowed to press it, Stumble asks that you mark your interests in a long list of tags that are assigned to web pages, and everything from Art to Journalism to Conspiracy Theories to Conservative Politics to paper crafts are present. After selecting all of your favorite things, you can finally click on the Stumble button, marking the beginning of a downward spiral of addiction, sleeplessness, and dependency.
After a few seconds’ wait, a web page you have never seen before appears before you, based on the interests you selected earlier. If you enjoyed the page, you click another new button in your tool bar, the Thumbs Up “I like It!” button. This will give you more related web sites that other users with your interests liked. Otherwise, you can leave it alone and take another hit or click the thumbs down to indicate that you don’t want any more sites like this.
This application is not as popular as the other three sites, based on Google searches, yet eBay acquired StumbleUpon for 75 million dollars and moved its headquarters from Calgary, Alberta in Canada to San Francisco.
Users of Stumble have noted its addictive nature and its ability to trigger insomnia. Users have also inserted jokes for other stumblers to stumble into, a sort of meme, my favorite being the End of the Internet.
