DISQUS

VentureBeat: There’s a method behind StumbleUpon’s madness

  • christie · 1 year ago
    Terrific article! Your piece allows “understanding with ease” for us who are less cyber savvy. Thank you for the clarification on StumbleUpon.
  • Marios Alexandrou · 1 year ago
    I've often wondered about the effect of not voting on something explicitly. It seemed to me that such behavior should be considered as a negative rather than a positive factor and it sounds like the SU folks share my thinking. Now if you down vote something AND write a review, do you suppose that's a stronger negative signal than just down voting?

    By the way, it looks like your blog theme is scaling the SU image making it hard to read.
  • MG Siegler · 1 year ago
    Re: voting down and writing a review, interesting thought, not sure on that one :)

    As for the image, sorry about that looks like it failed to link to the larger version, I'll get that online later tonight for you.
  • Imran Hussain · 1 year ago
    Great post Siegler, StumbleUpon is one great alternative to googling interesting websites. I really like most of the stumbles and the best thing is that they aren't crap unlike other social link recommendation websites. It would be interesting to see how StumbleUpon and Digg's recommendation engines compare in terms of quality.
  • MG Siegler · 1 year ago
    That would be interesting to see, Digg is still very much in the "learning" process though for its system.
  • Engago team · 1 year ago
    We got StumbledUpon twice and that resulted in many website hits, the number of visits more than doubled on those days.
    Sadly most of these visitors, just visited one page.
  • MG Siegler · 1 year ago
    That's unfortunately a side-effect, but I'm sure at least some liked what you had to say and checked out some other pages.
  • David Dunn · 1 year ago
    Thank you very much for this post - was probably the best blog post I've read in a while :-)

    I knew the basics of what went into the toolbar recommending me a website but I didn't know to this extent what happened.

    I found your blog post during my 'Random Stumble', the blog post and more comments about your post can be found on my blog here: http://ferraridave.com/random-stumbleupon

    Thanks again :-)
  • MG Siegler · 1 year ago
    Your welcome David, thanks for the kind words, glad to provide insight.
  • John McCollum · 1 year ago
    You'd think with all that complex stuff going on, they'd check before sending you ten duplicates of the same content! :)

    Thanks for the article - I didn't know they were developing a web only version, or increasing the number of friends you could have. Looking forward to more developments from SU.
  • MG Siegler · 1 year ago
    Duplicates is something else we talked about but I didn't have room to fit in. StumbleUpon takes that very seriously and realizes what a problem it can be, they continue to work on better solutions - I'm sure you know Digg has a very similar problem as well.
  • mandrill · 1 year ago
    Nice, I hadn't thought about how Stumble actually worked before. The web based version looks interesting, and I'm glad they plan to increase the freind limit.
  • Pierre Henri Clouin · 1 year ago
    Excellent write up about StumbleUpon's back-end.

    While SU is a great service for content and website discovery, I am surprised that the prospective roadmap does not include an integration with eBay to browse/discover products and auctions.
  • Vacation Rentals By Owner · 1 year ago
    Stumble rocks. You can get a huge amount of traffic from this site with hardly any work.
  • Internet TV · 1 year ago
    I'm quite sure there's a purple Dragon in there somewhere.
  • localsheriff · 1 year ago
    Aha! Who knew? Interesting, thank you!
  • constantskeptic · 1 year ago
    I love stumble upon. I use it every day. One of the best ways to discover great content.
  • David · 1 year ago
    Stumble Upon is great, they just need some way to sort your stumbles, as well as a good search feature that allows you to search your stumbles. Once you stumble something it tends to be lost and gone forever (if you stumble a lot at least)
  • Franklin · 1 year ago
    This is really interesting stuff. It is amazing how far stumbleupon has came.
  • net working · 1 year ago
    Yes, stumble has really evolved since the early days of randomly showing crap. I really like how they've found a way to weed out the weak advertisements people do for their e-com websites. social bookmarking != SEO work ... thanks SU for keeping it separate again.
  • sheilaludlowusa10@yahoo.com · 1 year ago
    I cannot get stumble upon videos to play. It lets me log in but when I click on a video it goes to the black screen only.
  • carolyn · 1 year ago
    this looks a lot simpler
  • slippylane · 1 year ago
    Fascinating. I guess I should give SU more than the occasional bored click to get more out of it.
  • Christopher Hire · 1 year ago
    Excellent explanation of StumbleUpon. Concise, Clear. Well done, MG.

    Christopher
  • SolReka · 1 year ago
    ebay own stumble. Now that I did not know. tut tut :-)

    I still have no idea how to make best us of Stumble. I stumble sites, review them and click whether I like it or not. This is all I do.

    Am I missing a trick of the trade here?

    What are the best methods and practices for using StumbleUpon?
  • Murty BVNS · 1 year ago
    Very good introduction to Stumbleupon recommendation engine. Stumbleupon homepage has this content about their technology very few people read because it is hid in tabs without a direct page. To many who are using Stumbleupon it could be a revelation. This made Stumbleupon much preferable to use as a default search than Google, the relevancy and quality.