Difference between revisions of "StumbleUpon"

Revision as of 20:22, 18 October 2012

StumbleUpon is a website which provides users with web pages, videos, pictures, and music based on their likes and interests. Users are guaranteed to never be bored again, as every time they “Stumble” the results filtered to match their personal and unique desires. Using the process of collaborative filtering (making automatic predictions by collecting preference information,) StumbleUpon makes recommendations to provide each user site after site of relative information to him or her. Users can specify certain fields they’d like to receive content about, and “like” or “dislike” the provided pages to give feedback to StumbleUpon to ensure that their next “stumble” is the most applicable to them. In September of 2012, the iOS app for StumbleUpon was released including the “StumbleDNA” feature which not only provides recommended websites, but also features a user-activity review page and trending interests (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon.) StumbleUpon is suitable for most internet browsers including Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. With this broad range of accessibility and the extreme ease of users to Stumble and “like,” users can revel in boredom’s defeat by Stumbling on.

History

In November of 2001 StumbleUpon was founded by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Eric Boyd, and Justin LaFrance. Angel investors (including Ram Shriram of Google and Mitch Kapor of Mozilla) heard of the site and offered up $1.2 million dollars in funding. In May of 2006 the website became mainstream and began gaining webcoverage. It had over 1.6 million registered users by that December, 8.7 million members by the end of 2009, and reported an estimate of 5 billion “stumbles” in May of 2008 (http://www.blueglass.com/blog/what-is-stumbleupon-the-history-and-timeline/.) As the site continued to expand, new features were added such as StumbleVideo and StumbleThru. StumbleVideo was introduced in December 2006 as a form of stumbling where only videos can be seen, coming from top-notch sites such as YouTube, Google, CollegeHumor, and FunnyOrDie. StumbleThru was launched in April of the following year, allowing users to not only filter their interests but also choose the particular websites they’d like to be searching through, such as Flickr and Wikipedia. In May 2007, eBay purchased StumbleUpon for a whopping $75 million dollars. They claimed that it would “help them learn more about newly emerging community based businesses” and planned to leave the site just how it was (http://techcrunch.com/2007/05/30/ebays-stumbleupon-acquisition-confirmed-at-75-million/.) The amount of page views seemed to be starting to drop, but this was most likely- because users don’t always return to the home page after each stumble and therefore their hits aren’t recorded. The very next year, eBay put StumbleUpon back on the market. At the same time, the website launched it’s now commonly known toolbar feature, which enabled users to stumble freely without the installation of anything on their computers. In April of 2009 Garret Camp and Geoff Smith, along with a few other investors, bought back StumbleUpon for a rumored $25 million dollars and labeled it a start-up once again (http://www.distilled.net/blog/infographics/history-of-stumbleupon-from-startup-to-influential-social-media-network-site-infographic/.) That October, StumbleUpon introduced a new version of their website, which included an enhanced web-based browser toolbar and features such as “Stumble on the go” and fresh content on all category pages. Come February of 2010, Marc Leibowitz joined the team from Google as the new Vice President of Business Development and Marketing (http://www.stumbleupon.com/blog/welcome_marcleibowitz/.) In May of 2010 StumbleUpon announced a 118% increase in active users in the previous year. By June it boasted 10 million members and is still growing rapidly today.

StumbleUpon Services

The most common way to use this website is by clicking the “stumble” button on the top left corner of the browser toolbar. This brings up a webpage containing one of the interests the user has specified that they would like to see. This page has been rated by previous users, judging on the amount of “likes” or “dislikes” it has received by clicking the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” icons next to the “stumble” button. The content with the most “thumbs up” is shown the most, and those with “thumbs down” are viewed less. The user-profiles of those doing the liking and disliking also affect how strong their rating is considered (http://www.blueglass.com/blog/what-is-stumbleupon-the-history-and-timeline/.) Upon submitting new content, it is manually categorized out of over 400 categories and tags. The way recommendations occur, according to www.stumbleupon.com, is through “a combination of human opinions and machine learning.” It combines the settings of the Stumbler (what categories they selected they’d be interested in,) the actions of users who have similar preferences and history to them, and the users own history of liking and disliking in the past to make future suggestions. Through “collaborative filtering” each user’s ratings of websites work to become more and more relevant towards making recommendations as the user’s become more active. At the same time, social –networks of similar users are created based on their interests.

Ethical Problems

The concept of the collaborative filtering system used by StumbleUpon to make personalized recommendations for each user. Using this type of system, one type of preference will always dominate the others. A new user or new data will cause problems to arise for personalized recommendations because the amount of data is insufficient for the filtering system to work. The new user does not have any previous “likes” or “dislikes” on StumbleUpon for the system to base it’s results off of their preferences. Also, new data added does not have sufficient ratings yet to be paired correctly with users. In addition to this issue, the ethical concern arises of the information being displayed on StumbleUpon is biased. Much of the information seen is added by users themselves, and this creates a certain category of information adders, or more specifically, those with access to a computer or the ability to create websites. Many who do not fall under this category fail to be able to participate in adding their point of view or factual information to StumbleUpon, and a gap in knowledge or bias of information is created.

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon
2. http://www.distilled.net/blog/infographics/history-of-stumbleupon-from-startup-to-influential-social-media-network-site-infographic/
3. http://www.blueglass.com/blog/what-is-stumbleupon-the-history-and-timeline/
4. http://techcrunch.com/2007/05/30/ebays-stumbleupon-acquisition-confirmed-at-75-million/.)
5. http://www.stumbleupon.com/blog/welcome_marcleibowitz/
6. http://www.stumbleupon.com/about