(Credit)

Not everyone follows Stumble closely, so let’s go through some of the most recent updates:

1 – Being More Publicly Visible

Garrett Camp, the co-founder has certainly done his fair share of appearances at events but it was good to see that the SU team came out for a South by Southwest Party!

2 – Improved Advertising Network

Why should Facebook ads, sponsored Tweets, Digg sponsors, and FourSquare mayor rewards have all the fun? SU has gone through and dramatically improved their advertising network, most notably adding the option of paying with a credit card and not just PayPal.

3 – Interactive Badges!

This is the improvement we’ve all been waiting for.  With all the Tweetmeme retweet and Facebook share buttons out there (yes, Digg and Reddit have them too) we have long been hoping for an interactive StumbleUpon badge.  This was previously available from SU if you were a major publisher but now anyone with a website can add an SU badge with pride (and hopefully some traffic, too ).

4 – StumbleUpon for Chrome

SU’s latest news into the mix is adding StumbleUpon toolbar to Chrome:

This is a wonderful addition to the web toolbar and Su.pr, StumbleUpon’s link shortening tool.

Kudos to you again StumbleUpon, for all that you do!

(image credit: xyzzy)

What a year it has been for StumbleUpon.

First, having it break away from eBay (who’s been on a divestiture streak as it is, also recently spinning off Skype) and be repurchased by the original founders seems to be paying off.  Since then, we’ve seen:

• A new UI (in beta for a while and rolled out fully as of yesterday)
• Su.pr,  a url shortner that also allows you to schedule posts as well as excellent analytics

The latest SU innovation is the addition of new topics.  While this may not sound like much, it actually makes all the difference.  Let me explain.

Let’s say you were at your local library and you wanted to find books about cooking.  But wait … there is no cooking section! So, you have to go to a more generalized/unrelated section of the library (dining out? hobbies? food?) to find what you’re looking for.

And that’s exactly what has plagued Stumbleupon for so long.

Granted, part of the issue is that users aren’t typically librarians and really don’t know how to categorize things for the betterment of others.  Now, we as SU users have more options:

• Arts/History: Design, Photoshop, Quotes, Woodworking
• Commerce: Home Business, Luxury
• Computers: Facebook
• Hobbies: Crochet, Quilting, Scrapbooking
• Sci/Tech: Gadgets, Technology
• Society: Christmas

As far as social media goes, the noteworthy update in there is that you now can have an interest called Facebook.

Keep up the good work, StumbleUpon!  We appreciate it.

But after trying the service for over a week, I have to admit that my initial reaction may have been a little bit hasty.  This shortening service may actually have some potential.  If they work on the ideas that people are suggesting, the veteran of the game – TinyURL - may start to have some sleepless nights ahead.

The main advantage that Su.pr has over other similar sites is that it has the power of the Stumbleupon community behind it.  Once Su.pr gets onto the Stumbleupon toolbar, those fans will be using it all the time to shorten and track their Stumbleupon submissions.  This is something that big names such as TinyURL doesn’t have – a ready made user base who will embrace the service from the word go.

You can sign into Su.pr with your Stumbleupon account or use the beta code “suprbeta”. (Update: StumbleUpon just made Su.pr public) Once in, you have two immediate options – just shorten a link (to do with what you will) or “Post” which will send the link to Twitter and/or Facebook.

Clicking “just shorten” will give you a nice short URL as the service is supposed to do:

But if you choose to “post” it, you can then open up all the tracking possibilities.

Once posted, you will see your “stats” section open up below with the link you have just posted.

Now click on “thumb up now” to submit the link to Stumbleupon.   This opens up a box to thumb the link up and also give you an opportunity to make a comment, just like you would on any other Stumbleupon submission.

After you have submitted the link to Stumbleupon, click on “view stats” to get an immediate overview of who is viewing your submission.

As you can see, it shows you how many Stumbleupon views you are getting as well as retweets and where your traffic is coming from – directly typed in, bookmarked, email and mobile.  Since this link has just been submitted, the page is pretty much blank but once people start receiving the link, that graph will quickly fill up.

One possible privacy issue is that you can view the Stumbleupon stats for ANY website, even if you are not the owner of that site.  Just go to http://su.pr/report/domain/yoursite.com/ and enter the domain name in place of yoursite.com.  OK, perhaps some webmasters may not consider their stats top secret but some others, including the really big blogs with a lot of advertising money at stake, may not want their stats thrown out there for all to see.  A way to lock this page down unless you are the owner may be a good idea for Su.pr to urgently consider.

What if you don’t want to post a Su.pr link just now but later at a certain time? No problem there either.  Su.pr has you covered.  Just use the “schedule for later” option and enter the time you want it sent. Be careful though to choose your correct time zone, though.

That is the basic essence of Su.pr – to give you a way to shorten your links and then track them.  But you would be sorely mistaken if you thought that was the end of it.  Oh no, there’s more so let’s take a look at them all.

First there’s a Worpress plugin.  Apart from being able to have your links posted to Twitter and Facebook,
the plugin also allows you to set up custom domain short URL’s.  So instead of http://Su.pr/ABCD, you can now have http://yourdomain/ABCD.  This is a fantastic development for anyone who does a lot of URL shortening and at the same time wants to promote their blog domain. Just follow the instructions here to find out how to do it.

Another great feature of the WordPress plugin is that a Stumbleupon toolbar will appear on your domain when someone clicks on a Su.pr URL in one of your blog posts.  This gives them the chance to thumb it up and down and also track the URL at the same time. However there seems to be a big hiccup in this department as stumbling Su.pr links with this toolbar will take you to an error page. It seems that the Su.pr team may have released this option a bit too prematurely.

Having the Stumbleupon toolbar at the top of the domain though will probably be a big boon for webmasters who want to push their content a bit more.   If you put your domain name into your Su.pr settings then when the toolbar shows up, your most popular links will appear in an iframe to the right of the page along with the number of stumbles that link has received.

Su.pr also has an API key so developers who wish to make products around the Su.pr concept will be able to do so. So look out soon for Adobe AIR apps to shorten your links from and iPhone apps.  Although the Su.pr team are already looking at such concepts in their suggestions forum.

For those who like things a little bit simpler, there is also a browser bookmarklet which will make it a bit easier to turn the pages you’re on into Su.pr links.

It’s great how the Stumbleupon team have taken such a common concept such as the short URL and turned it into a tool of many uses, as well as heavily promoting the Stumbleupon service at the same time.  When you think about how former owners eBay were letting Stumbleupon stagnate, it’s good to see the site going back to their original owners and those owners going all out to create something which may in the long term revolutionize the site and the web.  Look at it this way, how many short URL sites are offering all the things that Su.pr is offering and when you look at the suggestions forum, it’s obvious that Su.pr is going to knock out all other rivals at the short URL business.  For a start, the Stumbleupon community is driving it forward with ideas and suggestions on how to improve.

This is something that companies like TinyURL can only dream about.

But to simply label Stumbleupon a social network where you can find other amazing websites belittles its other amazing potential. For example, I have noticed it starting to influence search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Could Stumbleupon’s human-filtered search results be the beginning of the next evolution of search engines that could see the all-powerful Google algorithim be made redundant?

If you switch on the relevant feature in the Stumbleupon toolbar and then go searching in Google or Yahoo, you will then see this in your search results :

I chose “Garfield” as it was the first thing that popped into my head!

But you’ll see that there are now Stumbleupon factors in the search index. There are thumbs up, indicating a positive reaction from a Stumbleupon user, a speech bubble (indicating there are reviews available to read), the name of the Stumbleupon user that recommended the page and the category that the website appeared in Stumbleupon.

Now for Garfield, it’s no big deal whether someone likes him or not. But if you’re looking to buy something online or you’re looking for facts online, it helps to have pages that have been recommended by actual human beings, rated by human beings and reviewed by human beings.

Google may brag about its all-powerful algorithim but the one thing the algorithim doesn’t have is its ability to smell a scam or its ability to work out when a fact isn’t a real fact. Only real human beings can do that and that’s what makes Stumbleupon users with their ratings and reviews stand out from the crowd.

I’m very fond of calling Stumbleupon the “fledgling web democracy” because that is precisely what it is. It isn’t just a bunch of people looking at stupid websites and making profile pages. It’s a democracy of web users filtering out webpages and voting them up and down. That part, I think, is often overlooked by others and now that Stumbleupon has integrated itself into Google and Yahoo, that web filtering can start to influence overall search results and all the bad sites can now be voted to the very bottom. Something an anonymous computer algorithim can never do. Stumbleupon is the “Quality Control” of the World Wide Web.

If you want to take part in this web democracy, all you need to do is download and install the Stumbleupon toolbar and then switch on “Highlight Recommended Search Results”. Then start stumbling and voting!

But feel free to look at some LOLcats every now and then.

Written by Mark O’Neill