One of my favourite tools on the web is StumbleUpon. In short, SU is a toolbar which allows you to easily give a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to any site on the web. As long as it has a web address, you can give it your approval. These lists of your favourite sites/movies/mp3s are aggregated into a page at the StumbleUpon.com website, where you can share with 4,493,158 other websurfers, according to the SU site. I believe that SU’s structure as an entertainment-driven social network may enable it to compete with traditional Social Networks in the years to come.
The basic elements of SU aren’t exactly revolutionary for the web (see Digg or Del.ico.us). However, what really separates StumbleUpon from the bunch is its “Stumble!” button, which, based on your likes and dislikes, presents you with a targeted-but-random web page from its massive archives of over 12 million pages. Looking through your preferred categories, ‘liked’ sites, and combining that with user-based content tags and reviews, SU provides you with something you probably like: an mp3, a blog, a mainstream news article or a short video. And it often hits the right note. It seems as if the algorithm is very sensitive to your tastes, and also looks to your friends to detect their tastes too.
The idea may or may not be intriguing on paper, but it’s in that moment of boredom where this tool comes to life. Instead of hanging around my favourite blogs for the 15th time today, Stumble! takes me to the University of East Tennesse’s Philosophy Games club, where I can engage in their newest hit, battleground God. I believe that the market of people seeking this brand of alternative entertainment will grow wildly in the coming years, as a new generation of young folk grow up completely ensconced in web culture. These users may prefer a social network which focuses on its open collection of “fun stuff”.
SU is growing. StumbleUpon has had a steady growth from 600,000 users in 2005 to 4.5 million users today. According to Phil Butler, its slowly mounting success is due to “the methodology and ease with which content is collected and displayed”. This, I feel is the essential long-term benefit of SU over traditional social networks:
As opposed to Facebook or MySpace, where we connect to our friends, SU is a site which prioritizes our friends’ interests above their relationship to us.
So while it may still be a bit clunky for people to get used to the interface, eventually, SU holds a database of what people have enjoyed the most on the web, and a fantastic way of delivering that content for small hits of fun. And by connecting people together based on that information, SU has the potential to bloom into a social network that will facilitate conversations of the most pertinent entertainment to people, and this could make a big impact on social networking and perhaps, social living.
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Ramblings:
The image to my left is SU’s initial forays into friend recommendations, and I found that a few of these people had interests so similar to me, we could likely talk for hours.
This isn’t unlike what Last.FM ventures to do, or what Facebook does when it tries to match you with content, but the point I’m really making, is that it isn’t the interface or number of users that’s really going to determine our social future, but rather, an algorithm that can understand us.
Another point is that if there is a social networking shakeup, and an OpenID begins to surface, the entire web will become social (see Tim’s pontifications on Web 3.0). At that point, people will need a strong reason to devote their social time to a given site. Free, plentiful entertainment is always a good reason.
Miguel Helft from the New York Times referred to SU’s activity as “channel-surfing the Internet”, and the guys at SU label this paradigm of web interaction as “Web Discovery”.
Tags: Applications, Facebook, Social Network, Usability, stumbleupon by Neil
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