As a web designer and internet consultant, it is my job to stay on top of the latest and greatest technologies to grace the net. Few things have excited me in my never ending quest the way that StumbleUpon has. Judging by the 7,289,108 other users who are signed up, I am not the only one. In May of 2007, StumbleUpon excited Ebay enough to fork over $75,000,000 to acquire it. So what the heck is it?

StumbleUpon is a recommendation engine that serves you the best pages on the web based on your interests. It installs a toolbar in your browser that allows you to rate the pages it serves with thumbs up or thumbs down. Through this process it gradually hones in on your personal preferences. The engine will then serve you pages that people with similar interests liked also. Before you know it, the content is so good that you can’t wait to hit that stumble button on the toolbar to see what StumbleUpon will deliver for you to gaze upon next. In my first month using it, I bookmarked over 150 websites. This is more websites than I have bookmarked total in my previous fifteen years of surfing the web.

The reason I find StumbleUpon so interesting is because it has turned me on to fantastic websites and content that I have failed to find through search engines, word of mouth, and the numerous other ways we normally discover websites. In fact, the internet had shrunk on me and it wasn’t until StumbleUpon that I was reminded just how big and vast it is. It literally helped me rediscover the Internet and all that it has to offer.

Another great feature of StumbleUpon is that it is community-based allowing its users to form interest groups and add each other as friends. So if you read this article and decide to sign up, don’t hesitate to add me as a friend and let me know how much you enjoy StumbleUpon too. My username is gulfwebdev. Hope to see you on there!

Hugh Caraway
Gulf WebDev, LLC