StumbleUpon
Encyclopedia
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine (a form of web search engine
) that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.
Toolbar versions exist for Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite
, Google Chrome
and Internet Explorer
, but StumbleUpon also works with some independent Mozilla-based browsers. Third-party toolbars have also been created for Opera. It lacks support on Safari 5.
interview the moment for him in which he felt the company had really taken off: "When we passed the half a million mark (in registered users), it seemed more real."
The popularity of the software attracted Silicon Valley
investor Brad O'Neill to take notice of the company and assist with a move to San Francisco, as well as bringing in subsequent fund-raising totaling $1.2 million from other angel investors including Ram Shriram
(Google), Mitch Kapor
(Mozilla Foundation), First Round Capital
, and Ron Conway. Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith now reside in San Francisco, where StumbleUpon is headquartered.
StumbleUpon was owned by eBay
from May 2007, when it was acquired for $75 million until April 2009, when Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and several investors bought it back. StumbleUpon is now an independent, investor-backed startup once again, with offices in San Francisco and New York City.
(an automated process combining human
opinions with machine learning
of personal preference) to create virtual communities
of like-minded Web surfers. Rating Web sites update a personal profile (a blog
-style record of rated sites) and generate peer networks of Web surfers linked by common interest. These social networks coordinate the distribution of Web content, so that users "stumble upon" pages explicitly recommended by friends and peers. Giving a site a thumbs up results in the site being placed under the user's "favorites". Furthermore, users have the ability to stumble their personal interests like "History" or "Games".
Users rate a site by giving it a thumbs up, thumbs down selection on the StumbleUpon toolbar, and can optionally leave additional commentary on the site's review page, which also appears on the user's blog. This social content discovery approach automates the "word-of-mouth" referral of peer-approved Web sites and simplifies Web navigation.
Stumblers also have the ability to rate and review each others' blogs and join interest groups, which are community forums for specific topics. Users can post comments in the manner of a discussion board in these groups and post links to Web sites that apply to the specific topic.
On October 24, 2011, StumbleUpon deleted years worth of user-generated content, and removed HTML blogging, standalone blog posts, and photoblogging capabilities. Additionally, all previous blog posts were converted from HTML to plain text, and all photos were deleted from previous blog posts. StumbleUpon stated, "Over time, we’ve come to realize that we are not able to support and scale a blogging platform, in addition to our recommendation engine."
interface. The site currently aggregates videos from CollegeHumor
, DailyMotion
, FunnyOrDie, Google
, MetaCafe
, MySpace
, Vimeo
and YouTube
.
StumbleUpon launched a version of StumbleVideo for the Internet Channel Web browser that runs on the Wii
console on February 12, 2007. This version of StumbleVideo is optimized for the Wii's smaller screen resolution and offers similar functionality to that of the original version.
, Public Broadcasting Service
and Wikipedia
. According to the announcement of the feature, StumbleUpon plans on adding additional Web sites in the future.
As of June 13, 2010, sites using StumbleThru include BBC.com, Blogger
, Break.com
, CNN.com
, Collegehumor
, Flickr.com, FunnyorDie.com, Howstuffworks.com, HuffingtonPost.com, Metacafe.com, Pbs.org, PhysOrg, Rolling Stone
, Scientific American
, The Onion
, Wikipedia
, Wired.com, Wordpress
, and YouTube.
The StumbleThru service allows registered users to stumble on specific sites like the ones listed above, rather than the entire Web.
service. Its primary usage is for Twitter
and Facebook
statuses and updates. The service is similar to that of bit.ly
and TinyURL
. From March through May 2009, the su.pr service was only available to people who received an invite code. Currently it is available to all StumbleUpon
users.
. Early reports indicated that the company was also in talks with Google and AOL before the eBay announcement. In September 2008 eBay hired Deutsche Bank
to try to sell StumbleUpon again. On April 13, 2009, founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith and other investors including Ram Shriram
bought the company.
Web search engine
A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...
) that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.
Toolbar versions exist for Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite
Mozilla Application Suite
The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator...
, Google Chrome
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...
and Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
, but StumbleUpon also works with some independent Mozilla-based browsers. Third-party toolbars have also been created for Opera. It lacks support on Safari 5.
History
StumbleUpon was founded in November 2001 by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance and Eric Boyd during Garrett's time in post-graduate school in Calgary, Canada. The idea of creating a company was established before the content: of the five or six ideas for products, StumbleUpon was chosen. Garrett describes in a BBCBBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
interview the moment for him in which he felt the company had really taken off: "When we passed the half a million mark (in registered users), it seemed more real."
The popularity of the software attracted Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
investor Brad O'Neill to take notice of the company and assist with a move to San Francisco, as well as bringing in subsequent fund-raising totaling $1.2 million from other angel investors including Ram Shriram
Ram Shriram
Kavitark Ram Shriram is the founding board member of Google and one of the first investors in Google. He earlier served as an officer of Amazon.com working for Jeff Bezos, founder & CEO. Shriram came to Amazon.com in August, 1998, when Amazon acquired Junglee, an online comparison shopping firm of...
(Google), Mitch Kapor
Mitch Kapor
Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation...
(Mozilla Foundation), First Round Capital
First Round Capital
First Round Capital is a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Managed by Josh Kopelman, Chris Fralic, Rob Hayes and Howard L. Morgan, the Philadelphia-based company typically provides seed-stage investment that ranges from $250,000 to $500,000...
, and Ron Conway. Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith now reside in San Francisco, where StumbleUpon is headquartered.
StumbleUpon was owned by eBay
EBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
from May 2007, when it was acquired for $75 million until April 2009, when Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and several investors bought it back. StumbleUpon is now an independent, investor-backed startup once again, with offices in San Francisco and New York City.
Service details
StumbleUpon uses collaborative filteringCollaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering is the process of filtering for information or patterns using techniques involving collaboration among multiple agents, viewpoints, data sources, etc. Applications of collaborative filtering typically involve very large data sets...
(an automated process combining human
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
opinions with machine learning
Machine learning
Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...
of personal preference) to create virtual communities
Virtual community
A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals...
of like-minded Web surfers. Rating Web sites update a personal profile (a blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
-style record of rated sites) and generate peer networks of Web surfers linked by common interest. These social networks coordinate the distribution of Web content, so that users "stumble upon" pages explicitly recommended by friends and peers. Giving a site a thumbs up results in the site being placed under the user's "favorites". Furthermore, users have the ability to stumble their personal interests like "History" or "Games".
Users rate a site by giving it a thumbs up, thumbs down selection on the StumbleUpon toolbar, and can optionally leave additional commentary on the site's review page, which also appears on the user's blog. This social content discovery approach automates the "word-of-mouth" referral of peer-approved Web sites and simplifies Web navigation.
Stumblers also have the ability to rate and review each others' blogs and join interest groups, which are community forums for specific topics. Users can post comments in the manner of a discussion board in these groups and post links to Web sites that apply to the specific topic.
On October 24, 2011, StumbleUpon deleted years worth of user-generated content, and removed HTML blogging, standalone blog posts, and photoblogging capabilities. Additionally, all previous blog posts were converted from HTML to plain text, and all photos were deleted from previous blog posts. StumbleUpon stated, "Over time, we’ve come to realize that we are not able to support and scale a blogging platform, in addition to our recommendation engine."
StumbleUpon Video
On December 13, 2006, StumbleUpon launched their StumbleVideo site at http://video.stumbleupon.com/. The new site allows users without a toolbar to "stumble" through all the videos that toolbar users have submitted and rate them using an AjaxAjax (programming)
Ajax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...
interface. The site currently aggregates videos from CollegeHumor
CollegeHumor
CollegeHumor is a comedy website owned by InterActiveCorp and based in New York City. The site features daily original comedy videos and articles created by its in-house writing and production team, in addition to user-submitted videos, pictures, articles and links. In early 2009, CollegeHumor's...
, DailyMotion
Dailymotion
Dailymotion is a video sharing service website, headquartered in the 18th arrondissement, Paris, France. According to Comscore, Dailymotion is the second largest video site in the world after YouTube....
, FunnyOrDie, Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
, MetaCafe
Metacafe
Metacafe is a web site that specializes in short-form video entertainment in the categories of movies, video games, sports, music and TV.The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, London and Tel Aviv...
, MySpace
MySpace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
, Vimeo
Vimeo
Vimeo is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. It was founded by Zach Klein and Jake Lodwick in November 2004...
and YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
.
StumbleUpon launched a version of StumbleVideo for the Internet Channel Web browser that runs on the Wii
Wii
The Wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo on November 19, 2006. As a seventh-generation console, the Wii primarily competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Nintendo states that its console targets a broader demographic than that of the two others...
console on February 12, 2007. This version of StumbleVideo is optimized for the Wii's smaller screen resolution and offers similar functionality to that of the original version.
StumbleThru
In April 2007, StumbleUpon launched the StumbleThru service, allowing users of the toolbar to stumble within sites such as YouTube, The OnionThe Onion
The Onion is an American news satire organization. It is an entertainment newspaper and a website featuring satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news, in addition to a non-satirical entertainment section known as The A.V. Club...
, Public Broadcasting Service
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
and Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
. According to the announcement of the feature, StumbleUpon plans on adding additional Web sites in the future.
As of June 13, 2010, sites using StumbleThru include BBC.com, Blogger
Blogger (service)
Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish...
, Break.com
Break.com
Break.com is a humor website founded in 1998 that features comedy videos, flash games, and pictures among other material. The chief executive officer of Break is Steve Boss...
, CNN.com
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
, Collegehumor
CollegeHumor
CollegeHumor is a comedy website owned by InterActiveCorp and based in New York City. The site features daily original comedy videos and articles created by its in-house writing and production team, in addition to user-submitted videos, pictures, articles and links. In early 2009, CollegeHumor's...
, Flickr.com, FunnyorDie.com, Howstuffworks.com, HuffingtonPost.com, Metacafe.com, Pbs.org, PhysOrg, Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
, Scientific American
Scientific American
Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
, The Onion
The Onion
The Onion is an American news satire organization. It is an entertainment newspaper and a website featuring satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news, in addition to a non-satirical entertainment section known as The A.V. Club...
, Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, Wired.com, Wordpress
WordPress
WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system . It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1...
, and YouTube.
The StumbleThru service allows registered users to stumble on specific sites like the ones listed above, rather than the entire Web.
Su.pr
In March 2009, StumbleUpon launched the Su.pr an URL shorteningURL shortening
URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator may be made substantially shorter in length and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using an HTTP Redirect on a domain name that is short, which links to the web page that has a long URL...
service. Its primary usage is for Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
and Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
statuses and updates. The service is similar to that of bit.ly
Bit.ly
bitly is a URL shortening service owned by bitly, Inc., a betaworks company. It is especially popular on microblogging website Twitter because it is the default URL shortening service on the website since May 6, 2009, replacing TinyURL...
and TinyURL
TinyURL
TinyURL is a URL shortening service, a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 so that he would be able to link directly to newsgroup postings that frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.-...
. From March through May 2009, the su.pr service was only available to people who received an invite code. Currently it is available to all StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.Toolbar versions exist for...
users.
Advertising
StumbleUpon uses knowledge of user preferences to deliver targeted advertising. A small proportion of the "stumbles" users come across (typically less than 2%) are sponsored pages matching their topics of interest. For example, those signed up for photography will occasionally see an ad related to photography. Such content is vetted by humans for "quality and relevance" prior to its delivery. A sponsored site is identifiable by a green "person" logo on the toolbar. Paid accounts (referred to as "Sponsors") have a variety of options, including the ability to turn off such advertising.Growth
In December 2002, StumbleUpon had 1 million users. StumbleUpon claims to have more than 10,000,000 members as of May 18, 2010. StumbleUpon said that before the end of May 2008, it would have collected its five-billionth "stumble". More than one billion of which would have taken place in 2008 alone.. In August 2011, StumbleUpon reached 25 billion stumble mark, at which point they were adding over 1 billion stumbles per month. in October 2011, StumbleUpon announced that is had crossed 20 million registered users of the service.eBay
In May 2007, StumbleUpon was purchased by eBayEBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
. Early reports indicated that the company was also in talks with Google and AOL before the eBay announcement. In September 2008 eBay hired Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank AG is a global financial service company with its headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. It employs more than 100,000 people in over 70 countries, and has a large presence in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific and the emerging markets...
to try to sell StumbleUpon again. On April 13, 2009, founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith and other investors including Ram Shriram
Ram Shriram
Kavitark Ram Shriram is the founding board member of Google and one of the first investors in Google. He earlier served as an officer of Amazon.com working for Jeff Bezos, founder & CEO. Shriram came to Amazon.com in August, 1998, when Amazon acquired Junglee, an online comparison shopping firm of...
bought the company.
See also
- Delicious (website)
- DiggDiggDigg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
- FarkFarkFark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. As of June 2009, the site boasts approximately four million unique visitors per month, which puts it among the top 100 English language websites...
- RedditRedditreddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally...
- SlashdotSlashdotSlashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
- bit.lyBit.lybitly is a URL shortening service owned by bitly, Inc., a betaworks company. It is especially popular on microblogging website Twitter because it is the default URL shortening service on the website since May 6, 2009, replacing TinyURL...
- TinyURLTinyURLTinyURL is a URL shortening service, a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 so that he would be able to link directly to newsgroup postings that frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.-...
- Social bookmarkingSocial bookmarkingSocial bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them....
- Web 2.0Web 2.0The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
External links
- Advanced Stumbling Wiki
- StumbleVideo for Wii (Browser sniffingBrowser sniffingBrowser sniffing is a technique used in websites and web applications in order to determine the web browser a visitor is using, and to serve browser-appropriate content to the visitor. This practice is sometimes utilized to circumvent incompatibilities between browsers in areas such as the...
forwards non-Wii visitors to the normal StumbleVideo interface) - Garrett Camp in TR35