Stumble Through The Web, Installation-Free

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

First of all, if you don’t know what StumbleUpon is, then well, I’m sorry for your loss.

StumbleUpon is a web application that users submit pages to, and review. Then, when you click “Stumble,” you’re taken to a random website that might be interesting to you.

You can give sites a thumbs up or a thumbs down, or review them – the more you tell StumbleUpon, the more it knows about you, and the better the results get. It’s a great gateway to all the websites you might not see otherwise, but that you’ll probably like.

Like, say, this:

I called StumbleUpon one of the 8 Extensions That Will Keep You Stuck on Firefox, and still use it all the time. But not everyone’s a Firefox user, and not all users can install add-ons. It used to be that, without the add-on, your journey across the Web wasn’t going to be nearly as much fun.

Well, that’s all fixed now, thanks to a new release from StumbleUpon. Now, no matter what browser, version, or super-controlled computer you use, you can Stumble to your heart’s content. It comes in the form of a Web-based toolbar, in which you can use most of the great features of StumbleUpon without installing a thing. A black toolbar appears at the top, letting you manage your Stumbling life easily.

Getting started is easy: just go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/s/ in your browser. That link will load the brand-new StumbleUpon Web toolbar, as well as start your stumbling.

You can stumble to your heart’s content without logging in just by clicking the “Stumble!” button on the left side of the toolbar, but you won’t get any of the personalized features of StumbleUpon. Once you log in (it’s free to create an account), the toolbar has all sorts of coolness. You can thumb a page up or down, search through your chosen “topics” to find only what you’re in the mood for, and see how many people liked a site, as well as what they said about it.

All results show up in what’s called an iFrame, which means the link is all stored within the StumbleUpon page. The link you’ll see in the address bar is not the permalink, but is instead a StumbleUpon link. It’s not a huge deal, but means your stumbling is all within the one, permanent toolbar link. Data is also stored through cookies, which means your Stumbling history can be saved across sessions, and you won’t get repeat and pointless results.

If you click the house icon on the right side of the toolbar, you’ll be taken to your StumbleUpon homepage. There you can see what you’ve thumbed up and reviewed, as well as find friends and even more new stuff.

Now I won’t pretend that StumbleUpon is the best, or most productive, use of your time, but it’s darn sure one of the most fun. I mean, if it’s good enough to get my Mom hooked, it’s got to be pretty darn good.

Photo: matildaben

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