StumbleUpon

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The current StumbleUpon logo, which began use in 2011.

StumbleUpon is a website which provides users with web pages, videos, pictures, and music based on their likes and interests. The site alleviates boredom, as every time users “Stumble” the results are filtered to match their personal and unique desires. Using the process of collaborative filtering, StumbleUpon recommends sites containing information relative to its users. 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. StumbleUpon is suitable for most internet browsers including Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

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 $1.2 million dollars in funding. In May 2006, the website became mainstream and gained webcoverage. It had over 1.6 million registered users by December 2006, 8.7 million members by the end of 2009, and reported an estimate of 5 billion “stumbles” in May of 2008. 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 with only video content; videos come from 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 filter websites. In May 2007, eBay purchased StumbleUpon for $75 million dollars. Ebay reasoned that the site would “help them learn more about newly emerging community based businesses”; thus planning to leave the site just how it was. The amount of page views since dropped, 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 enables 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. 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. 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.

Using StumbleUpon

The most common way to use this website is by clicking the “stumble” button on the top left corner of the browser toolbar. This initiates 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. By joining StubleUpon's latest feature, StumbleUpon Beta, one is provided with four in addition to the basic "stumble" button. StumbleUpon data has tabs labeled "Recommended", "Activity", "Trending" and "Lists." "Recommended" is where the user will find recommended content specifically from them from the interests they are following, much like the original "stumble" feature. "Activity" produces pages that the user's friends have liked, shared, and commented on. The "Trending" feature displays the pages generating the most buzz across the entire StumbleUpon community, including all interests. Lastly, the "Lists" feature allows the user to create a list for any reason, such as a wish-list of items wanted, places to visit, pages to save for later, and anything else. One can follow other people's lists and be notified when content is added to that list.

The new StumbleUpon Beta layout, featuring Recommended, Activity, Trending, and Lists tabs.

How StumbleUpon works

The content with the most “thumbs up” is shown the most, and those with “thumbs down” are viewed less. The user-profiles of those liking and disliking also affect how strong their rating is considered. 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' history of preferences 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. At the same time, social –networks of similar users are created based on their interests.

Ethical Problems

The concept of the collaborative filtering system is 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 since 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 that 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 is unable 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 can be created.

References

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