StumbleUpon's Main Attraction Is Leading Users To WebSites They Would Find Engaging And Might Otherwise Never Find.

Site discovery engine StumbleUpon may not have as many members as Facebook, but this summer it excelled Facebook as the largest referrer of Net traffic to other sites, according to StatCounter. Today we have a lot of ways for development of a web page in Croatian izrada web stranice and a lot of different programs for many social networks. That is good for business and global management.

So what precisely does StumbleUpon do, and is using it worthwhile? StumbleUpon's main attraction is leading users to websites they'd find interesting and might otherwise never find. It can be addictive, a form of procrastinator's chum and insomniac's dream site.

When you join StumbleUpon you're pushed to form a personalized profile and identify some of your interests. For my interests, I checked off books, Internet tools, web-based games, fitness, and others. Primarily based on my interests, likes, StumbleUpon culled a sequence of Web pages for exploration. StumbleUpon has more than a hundred different advice methods it can use when determining what content to show a user.

On the home page I was prompted to "stumble" to press a button and go to a website that might interest me. (Users can also install a Stumble button on their browser toolbar.) The first site I stumbled upon was a trailer for a Nintendo game. The next was a file-sharing service. The next was a site for sharing footage of food. The following? The simple way to win at rock-paper-scissorsevery time. I got sucked into a video ad for PilotHandwriting.com, thought a quinoa oatmeal recipe sounded fascinating but too healthy, and discovered I wasn't very good at an internet game that measured reaction time.

But StumbleUpon does not give direct search results the way Google does and although it has social networking elements it doesn't do social as well as Facebook does.

Latterly, StumbleUpon introduced a thing by the name of the "Explore Box" so that users can search for Webpages in a less convoluted way.

I was hoping the new Explore Box would result in search results more tailored to what I might be looking for. It didn't.

I typed "Hong Kong" into the Explore Box, my interest in the city increased after a trip there. The 1st result that came up was a WSJ blog post about the Broadway play "Chinglish." The following result was an article about a upcoming Google Android mobile event in Hong Kong, but the 3rd stumble brought me to the Wikipedia page for the word "barrister," which did not seem clever to me initially. When I scrolled down I saw that "barrister" is a title occasionally used in the legal profession in Hong Kong.

Next, I searched for "iPhone 4S", and the 1st result was the Wikipedia page for the term "IP set." I quickly stumbled to the subsequent site, which was a business page that sells GPS devices and night-vision cameras. Hmmnot precisely iPhone 4S-related material. The next site was a how-to for implementing IP routing. I gave up on that search.

Whether or not they were discovered thru my interests or thru direct searches in Explore Box, lots of the StumbleUpon results I came across were older articles, from 3 days to one or two years old which could be a disadvantage for newshounds. A representative for the company says StumbleUpon's sweet spot is somewhere between one week and one month when it comes to how dated the content is.

A minute percentage of stumbles will also lead users to centered ads, the key source of revenue for StumbleUpon. I didn't find the ads to be really intrusive, however.

Another possible downside users should consider is the potential to stumble upon virus-laden Webpages some of the sites I discovered did look pretty dodgy or, in a few cases, adult internet sites (read : "NSFW"). StumbleUpon announces it has a dedicated spam-protection engineering team that scans sites and removes URLs when required from StumbleUpon's discovery engine, and that while it's possible for a user to come across antagonistic content, it's rare. As for R-rated and adult content, users can set their preferences to prohibit such content but as with noxious sites, on infrequent occasions that content can sneak through filters depending on how it's specified.

The company also details in its most current privacy policy that StumbleUpon installs cookies on your Browser, tracking technologies that follow you from site to site. StumbleUpon says this is to provide users with a rather more private and interactive experience on the website. You can disable these cookies in some browsers, though your StumbleUpon experience could be more limited in that case.

Is StumbleUpon and its new Explore Box worthwhile? Despite a rather more centered search function, it's not the place to get directions or diner reviews, like Google or Yap, it doesn't offer links to applicable news the way Twitter feeds do and although it has social elements, it's not Facebook. Nevertheless it does lead users to some interesting content, and the service is growing, due partly to its target mobile and tablet applications that permit users to swipe thru stumbles. Personally I would not use it often I prefer my curated Twitter feed to StumbleUpon but in the age of overflowing online media, StumbleUpon is taking a unique approach to finding it for you as reported tagza.com.