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:

Su.pr (pronounced “super”) is a new service that was put together by Tim Ferriss and the team over at StumbleUpon.  Su.pr works as a URL shortening service that connects to your StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Facebook account.  Ferriss states that Su.pr helps users “get you more traffic in less time.”

Ferriss said that one of the problems he wanted to solve was that he did not want to use one URL shortening service to track analytics and another URL shortening service to send to multiple platforms.  It was too much of a hassle.  Out of this hassle and problem, Ferriss decided to come up with Su.pr.

Using Su.pr, you can send out a link on Twitter or Facebook and monitor how many clicks were made on that link and how many more views were made on the link by StumbleUpon users.  Su.pr allows users to submit content that can be accessed by StumbleUpon’s nearly 8 million users.  There are even suggestions for what time a link should be submitted to get the most optimal traffic.  Best of all this whole analytics platform around StumbleUpon is in real-time.

Once you find out the optimal time to submit a story, you can even schedule what time you want to have a story sent out.  This is perfect if you are away from the computer at the time.

Su.pr does take over the URL of a website’s blog post or new article, but that does not hinder the website from reporting the unique visitor or pageviews.  However there will soon be an additional WordPress plugin available later this week to maintain SEO.

Personally I’ve placed a link to Su.pr on my browser toolbar. I’ll be using this service quite a bit to share content that I find is interesting.

For more information, check out Ferriss’ blog post about the service on FourHourWorkWeek.com.

Above is a screenshot of multiple toolbars being used here that I pulled from an experiment at Rev2.org.  It includes a web toolbar from Krumlr, Ow.ly, Digg, and Facebook.  When I see a screenshot like this, I cannot help but think how this reminds me of GeoCities circa 1990’s when there was that stupid web banner that dragged up and down as you scrolled through content pages.  That banner alone helped contribute to the downfall of GeoCities.

The first one to come up with the toolbar out of all of the Web 2.0 companies was StumbleUpon.  Their web toolbar was just an alternative to the Firefox or Internet Explorer toolbar.  StumbleUpon just made it easier to use the service for those who did not have access to their own computers with the toolbar already installed.

But then Digg decided to replicate StumbleUpon’s web toolbar even though it was not necessary whatsoever.  The community was much better off without the Digg toolbar.  Given Kevin Rose is such an avid Twitter user and Digg wanted more traffic, this is why they created the toolbar and shortened the links for Digg.com URLs.

It didn’t stop at Digg.  Facebook decided to get into the web toolbar game by creating that feature for shared links on the social network.

All of these web toolbars are doing something worse than what the GeoCities banners were doing back in the 90’s.  These web toolbars are absorbing more traffic since it is their domain names being used but loading the content owner’s website in an iFrame.

By not getting the traffic that other websites are taking from you and if for some reason you aren’t getting the link-bank credit, then you could be potentially losing traffic.  Fortunately for Pulse2.com, our main traffic sources are not from these content-stealing web toolbars.  This is why I personally don’t mind it as much as many others.

For those of you out there that are using Wordpress, there are some plugins available that automatically kill off the web toolbars.  One of them is called “Frame Breaker, aka Die Digg-bar die!“

Fresh from spinning off independently from eBay, StumbleUpon has updated their web toolbar to match some of the features that are on the web browser software add-on version of the toolbar.  Now the web toolbar allows you to select certain categories to stumble through and it displays the number of comments on the website.  Stories can be voted up or down, favorited, and e-mailed to friends.

As a matter of fact, when click on the share it button, another iFrame will open on the right hand side of the browser that will allow you to send the website to all of your StumbleUpon friends.  Even if you click Stumble!, the Share iFrame will remain intact.  This is useful because you don’t have to keep clicking on Share It every time you stumble to a new website.

Personally I’m still a bigger fan of the browser toolbar because it is easier than having to go to the StumbleUpon website to get started, but this makes it convenient for those that don’t use browsers supported by the software toolbar such as Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

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.

Once upon a time it was every blogger’s dream to see one of their posts make it to the Digg.com homepage.  That is up until other social media websites started making Digg.com irrelevant such as Reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon, etc.  I’ve seen the benefits of becoming popular on StumbleUpon a few times and have al seen the benefits of becoming popular on Digg several times.

Personally I prefer becoming popular on StumbleUpon since the traffic slows down after a few days, but it never goes away.  Even after becoming popular on StumbleUpon several months ago, you’ll still get thousands of hits every month from StumbleUpon.  Digg popularity just stays for a couple days and the traffic just goes away.

Late last month, I wrote about how Digg was secretly developing a web toolbar of their own to emulate the success of StumbleUpon and TinyURL.  In an interview with Wired, Digg executives Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson acknowledged the development of the DiggBar. When Wired asked Rose to explain the DiggBar, here is how he responded:

It’s not out yet, but it’s coming soon. Basically, it’s a small, framed bar, it’s not software you install.

It turns Digg into a short URL provider, so now all of our links will be, for example digg.com/8357. When you go to one of these shortened URLs, it draws a really thin bar across the top.

You get the full destination site underneath it, but you also get this thin bar at the top that allows you to Digg it, to see the hot comments on that story, to see related content to the article you’re viewing beneath it. There’s also a “random” button that gives you Stumble Upon-type functionality that takes you to random sites around the web.

If you want to create a Diggbar, just go into your browser’s address bar. Leave the full URL in there for the site you’re currently browsing, and just type “digg.com/” in front of that and hit Enter. We take that entire URL, process it, turn it into a short URL, then bring you back to the page with the Diggbar and the full original site beneath it.

You get redirected to the short URL, so you can grab it and copy it. We also have icons on the Diggbar to post to Facebook and Twitter. It’s just a great way to spread our content to the most popular microblogging services.

I think that this toolbar would actually be a value-add to Digg.com if only they could solve the bias that they have towards certain websites.  In the middle of last month I did a 7-day study on which sites appear the most on Digg.com’s technology section.  It turned out that 8 websites control over 30% of Digg’s technology section.

Soshable.com did a similar study yesterday.  It turns out that they found out that 46% of the Digg front page is controlled by 50 websites.  Below is a list of the top 30 “whitelisted” sites that become popular on Digg on a regular basis.

“In many ways, Digg has become the personal RSS feed for sites like TorrentFreak, xkcd, and Cracked as the vast majority of submissions from these and other sites will hit the front page regardless of the submitter,” stated the Soshable editor that put together the study.

As every day passes I become less interested in Digg and more interested in StumbleUpon.  What are your thoughts?  Leave a comment.

[via Wired]

I found out from a 3DogMedia.com article that there is a new, easy way to share content on StumbleUpon without having to click on the dreaded “Send To” button on the toolbar. I don’t know how new this feature is because I just found out about it, but I know that I’ll take advantage of it in terms of sharing content that I think is interesting.  Great new addition, StumbleUpon team!

Here is how it works:

Step 1: Go to your favorites section of your StumbleUpon account.  You can get to this by clicking on the “Favorites” button on your toolbar or go directly to the URL of your StumbleUpon account (http://YourUserName.tumbleupon.com).

Step 2: Put your mouse over one of the thumbnails of your favorites.  In the below screenshot, you will notice that I put my mouse over the top left favorite.

Step 3: When you click on Share, you will notice that a sidebar will appear and you can check-mark the friends that you want to send the article to.  Below is a screen shot of what the side bar looks like.  I blurred out my e-mail address so spammers don’t take advantage of it.

[via 3DogMedia]

If I had to choose between StumbleUpon and Digg about whether I believe one is more valuable, I would definetely choose StumbleUpon.  StumbleUpon suggests different content to every one of their users using an algorithm that is based on interests.  If I like reading about airplanes, StumbleUpon will suggest similar content to me about airplanes.  Digg basically suggests content to me that a bunch of random hardcore users selected.

Digg has taken a lot for being biased in the past.  There are certain users that seem to dominate the homepage over others.  Digg users such as MrBabyMan, msaleem, mklopez, louiebaur, irfanmp, MakiMaki, etc. submit a lot of content and have a good enough of a fan base to get homepaged regularly.  I have no problem with that because it is important for several users to be a benchmark in order to make other users more competitive and keep people interested in the site.

But I strongly believe that Digg has become too biased in terms of the sources of content being homepaged.  The other day I calculated that about 8 websites control over 30% of Digg’s technology section.  Arstechnica, AppleInsider, and Torrentfreak are about 18% of the stories that are homepaged in the technology section.  Now that gets pretty annoying.  If StumbleUpon showed me one of those websites every once every five times I click on the “Stumble” button, I’d get annoyed and uninstall the toolbar.

Let’s also not forget the facts here too.  Is StumbleUpon profitable?  Yes.  Is Digg profitable?  No.  Was StumbleUpon acquired?  Yes.  Was Digg acquired.  No.  Has StumbleUpon’s users revolted in the past?  No.  Has Digg’s users revolted in the past?  Yes, multiple times.  By definition, I’d say StumbleUpon has been more successful than Digg.

What do you do with successful services?  Emulate them.  Digg has admittedly done this with Slashdot and now they’re doing it to StumbleUpon as pointed out by TechCrunch (good catch Schonfeld via Belmont).

Digg is secretly working on a web toolbar.  The toolbar gives the ability to Digg or Bury a page that you are on.  It also shows how many Diggs the story.  The toolbar also reports links to related pages and reports what other pages from the same website have a ton of Digg votes along with upcoming.  There is also a random button that works similar to StumbleUpon.

Another interesting feature that the toolbar has is the ability to create a shortened URL.  It does not use TinyURL or Bit.ly to do so.  It creates six random characters after the Digg.com/ URL.  Then you can share this on Facebook or Twitter.  This feature was pretty much copied from what TinyURL and Bit.ly were already succeeding in doing.

In creating this toolbar, Digg has implied that they want to take on TinyURL and other URL shortening services along with StumbleUpon.  Out of spite, I have decided that I’m never going to use the Digg toolbar or use any of their URL shortening services when this feature comes out.  Instead I will always use TinyURL and StumbleUpon as long as they exist.

By the way, those who think that Digg is not necessarily “jealous” of StumbleUpon’s success because it is not an apples-to-apples comparison, I feel that they should be.  What is your opinion?  Leave it in the comments.

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.

StumbleUpon the website review company that was bought out by eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) for $75 million released a new feature earlier tonight.  StumbleUpon is especially known for their toolbar where users can Stumble to any random websites, review any website that they have visited, add friends, and add favorite sites.  Tonight StumbleUpon is releasing a toolbar that is web-based and doesn’t require a browser plugin. 

Initiating the web-based toolbar requires the user to start from the StumbleUpon homepage.  The homepage contains several categories where users can check out as a starting point for stumbling sites.  When the user leaves, the web-based toolbar will follow.  The StumbleUpon team has been playing around with the idea of a web-based toolbar over the last 6 years. 

StumbleUpon is also releasing a widget that allows publishers to show-off how many times that users have hit “I like it” for their individual blog posts or news stories in a counter form.  The widget would also allow users to view other related content on the counter.

StumbleUpon was founded by Garrett Camp.  StumbleUpon receives 35,000 new URLs submitted per day across 6 million users.  When asked if eBay is considering selling off StumbleUpon, Camp stated that he cannot respond to rumors.

eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) is rumored to have hired Deutsche Bank to find a buyer to sell off StumbleUpon, the social bookmarking site that they acquired for $75 million.  This rumor was started by a source of TechCrunch.  The price for selling off StumbleUpon is unknown.  I think it is still a mystery for why eBay bought the company in the first place.  What would eBay do with a social bookmarking site? 

As far as traffic measurements go, StumbleUpon had about 1.3 million global visitors and 25 million pageviews this past July.  About a year earlier, the site was bringing in 4.4 million global visitors and 31 million pageviews according to Comscore.  The number of registered users have gone up from 5 million to 6 million in the last 5 months.  StumbleUpon is growing at a moderate pace.  The more registered users, the more your valuation goes up.  I wouldn’t be surprised if eBay was able to resell StumbleUpon for what they paid. 

I’m estimating that Digg has about 3 million registered based on the fact that they had about 1 million users one month ago and their current growth rate.  And they were looking for an acquisition price somewhere north of $200 million.  It was rumored that they were in talks with Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), but it didn’t work out.

Lately it seems like eBay is barking up a lot of the wrong trees.  eBay is expected to have massive lay-offs.  They are fighting with Craigslist and several fashion designer companies in a legal battle.  A lot of their sellers are leaving due to the fixed-price model shift.  eBay is even having cognitive dissonance about their purchase of Skype. 

Two of the best acquisition deals that eBay made thus far was PayPal and StubHub.  There is actual synergy there.  PayPal runs the whole payment system around eBay auctions.  And StubHub is going to bank when selling the PSLs for the New York Jets.

“StumbleUpon[1] is a great fit within our goal of pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust,” stated Michael Buhr, a senior director at eBay Inc.[2] “StumbleUpon’s downloadable toolbar provides an engaging and unique experience to its users, but it is the similarities in our approaches to the concept of community that make it such a compelling addition to eBay[3].” Yesterday, eBay announced that the company would acquire StumbleUpon for $75 million.

StumbleUpon has roughly 2.3 million users and is known for the social network that revolves around the toolbar. The StumbleUpon community grew 150% and makes 5 million recommendations every day.

“We’re excited about joining eBay, as we share the same values around community and we look forward to working with them to accelerate our growth,” stated Garrett Camp, a StumbleUpon founder. Michael Buhr will now be serving as a general manager for StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon was formed in 2001 and is based in San Francisco. The other two founders of StumbleUpon include Geoff Smith and Justin LaFrance.

For those who do not understand how StumbleUpon works, the below screen shot should explain it:

Image credit[4]

[1] StumbleUpon.com
[2] eBay.com
[3] Business Wire: eBay Acquires StumbleUpon
[4] StumbleUpon >> Technology

eBay Inc. and StumbleUpon Inc. have resumed talks for an acquisition once again. I wrote about this matter earlier and underestimated the dollar amount involved. Before I believed that the amount was to be at $40-$45 million, but the Wall Street Journal reported that the amount is expected to be at $75 million.

Nothing is confirmed yet. Everything is just speculation right now.

StumbleUpon started up in 2001 in Calgary, Canada and has a toolbar that allows users to find relevant content based on interests and web surfing habits. StumbleUpon was founded by three people and was funded by Ram Shriram and Mitch Kapor.

StumbleUpon badges can be found on popular blogs and news websites including Pulse 2.0. StumbleUpon also acts as a social network that suggests friends. On April 19, StumbleUpon unleashed a feature called StumbleThru that allows users to allows users to find recommended content from particular domains such as Wikipedia, Flickr, and MySpace. The StumbleThru feature was announced on the StumbleUpon blog.

StumbleUpon announced that they crossed 2 million users in March. TechCrunch broke the initial acquisition possibility.

StumbleUpon is rumored to be in talks of an acquisition with eBay.  According to both GigaOm and TechCrunch, Google and AOL are other potential suitors as well.  The amount is rumored to be $40-45 million. 

Stumble Upon has a toolbar where users can rate various websites.  StumbleUpon badges appear are seen on blogs and other websites including Pulse 2.0 at the bottom of every post.  Essentially it is a website recommendation system.

StumbleUpon has 2.1 million users and has raised a previous $1.5 million in funding.