StumbleUpon

Few days back I stumbled upon an interesting website. Incidentally its name was “StumbleUpon”. It’s an application which helps you to find new sites of your interest.

StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. It is a collaborative surfing tool for browsing, reviewing and sharing great sites with like-minded people. This helps you find interesting web pages you wouldn’t think to search for.

It’s not just surfing the best reviewed site, you can even rate on the Stumbled sites. Rating these sites shares them with your friends and peers – you will automatically ‘stumble upon’ each other’s favorites sites. In effect, all the members collectively share the best sites on the web.

How to Install ?

If you are using Firefox, download the extension from this link: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/138/

(If you are not using Firefox, it’s high time you did )

Recently, support for IE is also added. You can get the installable from this link : http://www.stumbleupon.com/StumbleUpon.exe

Once the toolbar is installed, click on “Start Stumbling”

You will be prompted to create a new user account. While creating an account, you can also choose to select the kind of sites you like to stumble upon. (This can be changed later via the toolbar, or through the preference page)

Click “Stumble” on the toolbar. You will be directed to a best rated page within the category of your choice. The default category level will be set to “All”. You can change it according to your preference.

What else can I do ?

You can rate the sites that you stumble upon. You don’t need to necessarily rate only the “stumbledupon” sites. If you have any good sites within your bookmarks, open it and say “I like it”. If it’s not already in the “StumbleUpon”, you will prompted to submit the site for review.

If you make a mistake while rating a website, you can revert it back by clicking the “opposite” rating icon.

You can review the web page you visited, check messages in your inbox, look at the “StumbledUpon”, “Discovered” and “Rated pages”

You can also add new friends and build your network (Not sure how exactly this works)

Is it useful ?

You can find lot of quality content through RSS Feeds and Digg. StumbleUpon helps you accomplish the same thing and you get to visit the sites rated best by the community. I myself found a lot of interesting sites, the sites to which I could never find via a Google Search.

So go ahead and be a part of it. . If you do, don’t forget to add “kbvenu” to your friends list