Oh, hello there new StumbleUpon design. This past April, StumbleUpon had spun-off from their parent company eBay and has been improving upon the service ever since. The company improved their web toolbar and created a new analytics service called Su.pr.

Now the social media toolbar company has launched a new user interface that is “somewhere between a Twitter and Google” according to StumbleUpon co-founder Garrett Camp. StumbleUpon has about 8 million users that have stumbled about 35 million websites. All of these stumbled websites have now been indexed and StumbleUpon is tracking how many hits have been sent to them. The homepage for StumbleUpon users shows the recent activity for themselves and their friends.

StumbleUpon search results can be sorted by friends and by your own stumbles. The Discover tab allows users to sort recent stumbles by top rated, stumbles from friends, most shared, or by the topic. The toolbar itself will be updated later this week which will have the new features integrated. The toolbar will also have a new feature which will allow users to share links on Twitter and Facebook.

Below is a screenshot of the new user homepage:

About two years ago, eBay bought out StumbleUpon for $75 million. But today StumbleUpon announced that they are spinning off as an independent company again. The company is now backed by Geoff Smith and several other investors.

Last month StumbleUpon hit 7 million users.

StumbleUpon believes that this will help the company stay more focused on their goal — “helping people discover interesting web content. Our goal is to make StumbleUpon the web’s largest recommendation engine and we think this is the best way to get us there,” stated StumbleUpon co-founder Garrett Camp.

StumbleUpon, the social bookmarking site that was acquired by eBay, has hit 7 million users according to Garrett Camp.  StumbleUpon requires the use of a web-based or browser add-on toolbar.  If you like a website, then you simply click the “I like it” button.  You can discover new websites based on your interests by pressing “Stumble!” on the toolbar.

When clicking “Stumble!”, the website chosen next is based on both interests and the ratings by your friends.  The ratings of people with similar interests also has a role in displaying websites.  Although the toolbar has been created for Firefox and Internet Explorer so far, third parties have put together a StumbleUpon toolbar for Opera and Safari.

Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance, and Eric Boyd created StumbleUpon when they were in post-graduate school in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

“When we passed the half a million mark (in registered users), it seemed more real,” stated Garrett in an interview with the BBC a few years ago.  Clearly StumbleUpon is growing like a weed because they have 14 times the amount of users from when Garrett said that.

StumbleUpon became popular among the Silicon Valley crowd quickly.  This is what led to a $1.2 million investment in the social bookmarking site by Brad O’Neill, Ram Shriram (Google), Mitch Kapor (Mozilla Foundation), Josh Kopelman, and Ron Conway.  O’Neill helped Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith transition in moving to San Francisco.

In December 2006, StumbleUpon launched StumbleVideo.  StumbleVideo allowed users to click Stumble! and just have videos show up.  The site includes videos from YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, MySpace, and CollegeHumor.  About a year later StumbleVideo became compatible for the Nintendo Wii.

Around April 2007, StumbleThru was launched.  This enabled users to Stumble! through different pages of specific sites.  For example if you were visiting a result on Wikipedia, then a Wikipedia button would show up on the toolbar.  Clicking that button would use the algorithm to stumble you to another Wikipedia page that you might be interested in.

What I like most about StumbleUpon when compared to Digg or Reddit is that StumbleUpon provides constant traffic if a story becomes popular.  On Digg and Reddit, if you hit the homepage, it just gets a ton of traffic at once and then it all goes away.  If your story becomes popular on StumbleUpon, then it brings in a ton of traffic but keeps sending a good chunk of traffic everyday after that.

In July 2006, StumbleUpon had about 1 million users.  Around May 2008, StumbleUpon had seen its five-billionth stumble.  About one billion stumbles happened in 2008 alone.  eBay bought StumbleUpon in May 2007 for about $75 million.