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StumbleUpon announced today that it will be rolling out a new design to
make the service more accessible to new users. The biggest drawback has
always been the fact that users had to install a toolbar to use the
service, but with this new design, the need to do so has been
eliminated.
It's kind of interesting that StumbleUpon has waited so long to do
this. They had to realize that use could be greatly amplified if only
people weren't required to install that toolbar. Perhaps the idea of
eBay selling them provided motivation to actually change their ways.
Now I have been using StumbleUpon for a couple years now, and I feel
that the toolbar is non-intrusive. In fact, I find it to be quite the
opposite. I use it pretty frequently, particularly the search tool.
Honestly, I find it more helpful than even the Google Toolbar, which I
uninstalled. I will continue to use the StumbleUpon toolbar even as the
new design is rolled out.
I'm sure that not everyone
feels the same way about the toolbar that I do, which is why this is a
very smart move on StumbleUpon's part. It should play a key factor in
getting people to start using it in the first place. Even if many users
would see the usefulness of the toolbar once they started using it,
it's the convincing them of that which is truly the hurdle to overcome.
I don't see how this move won't translate into more users for
StumbleUpon, and theoretically, more users will mean more quality
content for the rest of us. "By allowing people to now Stumble without
registering or downloading a toolbar, we will surface the best content
on the Web to an even wider audience,” said StumbleUpon Co-founder
Garrett Camp.
Unfortunately, this also means the potential for misuse will skyrocket
as well. There will be more spam, and more people "gaming" the system.
Just like people pay Digg users to promote their stories. Just like
CareerBuilder is gaming Twitter. StumbleUpon would be wise to implement
some kind of strategy to deter behavior like this, but as other big
social sites struggle with it, there isn't much reason to believe that
StumbleUpon will be any different. My favorite part about StumbleUpon
is the quality of the results. I sincerely hope that doesn't change.
I'm not sure many people realize how useful the search feature of
StumbleUpon can be. It's not what you want to use to search for
specific things like you would with Google, but it's a great way to
find content you didn't know you should be looking for in the first
place on any given topic. It's not all about aimless surfing (although that can be rewarding at times too).
StumbleUpon has also announced a new partner program in which it will
team up with sites to incorporate an internal “stumble” feature into
them. Sites to sign up for this so far include HowStuffWorks.com,
HuffingtonPost.com, NationalGeographic.com and RollingStone.com.
“Many publishers have a significant amount of content on their Web
sites that is often buried and difficult to find. With StumbleUpon’s
new Partner Program, select premier publishers can expose personally
relevant content to their users by enabling Stumbling across their
site, and in turn, can create an even more engaging user experience.
StumbleUpon simply targets the publishers’ content to more relevant
users, increasing a user’s activity on the site,” said Michael Buhr,
general manager of StumbleUpon.
And that's all before the new plan. The partner program and
non-toolbar dependence should both be huge for StumbleUpon to grow its
business and ultimately become more profitable. eBay might think twice
about selling the service now, or at the very least, more parties will
likely become interested in buying.
Source: www.webpronews.com
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