StumbleUpon.com was created by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance and Eric Boyd. It is a for profit site in which users submit links to pictures, blogs, videos, articles or sites they find interesting. Users access these sites by clicking the “stumble” button on the top of their screens. StumbleUpon is the perfect site for people who have time to waste but don’t want to waste it inefficiently. It allows users to go through hundreds of pages within ten minutes because it only takes a click of a button. It only sends users to sites that fit their interests and continues to narrow those sites based on the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” ratings. Users are able to immediately store the sites for later viewing, share them with a friend or upload links of their own with ease.
I registered for the site and chose my preferences, including: health, news, rugby and science. The first click took me to an article that explained why hydrogen peroxide foams when applied to a cut. Although that particular article did not interest me, the site, howstuffworks, did have some other topics that I’d like to read. However, I don’t have time to read a bunch of articles so I gave the site a thumbs up rating which automatically bookmarked it so I can revisit it at a later time. The next click led me to an article which dealt with a gypsy woman’s struggle to break stereotypes. Culture is something that engages me, so I took the time to read the article but did not favorite the site, guardian.co.uk, because it is just a news site and I usually get my news from BBC. The next few clicks took me to sites which met my preferences. However, since the actual content did not interest me, I gave them a “thumbs down” rating and moved on. Finally, the last click took me to ManyBooks. It provided me with free e-books that I could download onto my iPhone.
StumbleUpon also allows users to discover things they never thought to look for before. In a nutshell, using StumbleUpon is a great way to find things you’re looking for and if you’re lucky, who knows, you may stumble upon some other great things as well.