StumbleUpon

Gerrit Visser asked me to look at this service: StumbleUpon. The first impression is that it is just a way to save your bookmarks, so that other people can see them. Nice, but I rather do that on my own site. However they also seem to give suggestions based on your interest. That makes it an advanced search service based on your complex personal profile (rated bookmarks). Which reminds me of the Alexa toolbar. In order to try it out on my Mac, I had to download a special browser: Firefox. Using Firefox will add a toolbar. This toolbar can be used to stumble along websites. Each website can be rated: like or dislike. It is not clear how sites are suggested. ANd finally, the system does not allow you to save bookmarks. First impression was wrong.

The service knows groups. Each user can belong to a group. Clicking on the group link, will present an overview of the group members with pictures and the related links. It is not clear to me what the related links present. Are they common links? Each group seems also to be related to other groups, but it is unclear how this is done.

Will I use this service however? No, I did some stumbling and there were to few interesting sites. That makes it to time consuming. I stick with my other method for stumbling: reading RSS-feeds.