StumbleUpon has been around since 2001, and their tag line boasts “Discover your web” and, truly, that’s what this service does. It provides the unique feature of showing you a random website, anytime, anywhere, and also learns and adapts to your interests, showing you websites specifically tailored to your preferences. Here’s a guide for users of all levels that will help you get the most out of StumbleUpon.
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The Toolbar
The first thing you’ll need to do after signing up for an account, is download/install the StumbleUpon toolbar. It’s available as a plugin for both Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (No Safari or Google Chrome version just yet). The toolbar includes a few different buttons: The Stumble button, which will give you a new webpage with every click. The Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down buttons, which will add or remove sites from your favorites list, as well as tell StumbleUpon to show you more or less sites like the current one.
The Share button is used when you want to share pages you’ve found with your friends on StumbleUpon. The Channels section will let you view sites in all the categories and sub-categories. And lastly, some buttons to view your favorites and the favorites of your friends. It’s good to note that the toolbar allows you to favorite things you didn’t even find on StumbleUpon, and your entire list of favorites is saved on your StumbleUpon profile for later.
Select Your Interests
One of the best things you can do to help you get the best stumbling experience is to accurately fill out the ‘Manage Interests’ section. By selecting the sublets you prefer, StumbleUpon shows you webpages that you are interested in.
Rate Everything!
By using the Rating system, StumbleUpon adapts to what you like, making sure that every time you stumble, you’ll see the content you really want to see. The system is pretty smart and if you remember to rate every page you come to, you’ll start seeing less and less stuff you don’t like.
Review, Review, Review.
Along with rating pages, reading and writing reviews will help you determine what sites of similar interests are the ones you really want to visit. A person is usually more inclined to check something out after seeing reviews and a positive rating for the particular item. Think of it kind of like Rotten Tomatoes, but for webpages.
Make Some Friends
Like every other social networking site out there, the more friends you have, the better. But here, there’s actually some purpose to the madness. With StumbleUpon, the more friends you have, the better content you’ll be shown. StumbleUpon uses your friends list as another metric of what it should show you. So having friends with similar interests makes it even easier for you to find good content. By checking out your friends’ favorites you can see what content they found with StumbleUpon and what they rated it. If you are mindful about who you friend, chances are, it’s stuff you haven’t seen yet.
While you’re making new friends, be sure to add Mashable here.
Stumble Specific Terms
The toolbar gives you a few different ways to actually discover new content. One way is to use a somewhat hidden feature which will allow you to stumble via specific term or query. All you have to do is open up the Toolbar Options panel by clicking “Tools > Toolbar Options…” and turn on the “Search” channel. This will add a magnifying glass icon to the toolbar. Clicking it will enable you to stumble through pages relevant to a particular query or search term.
Play With the Options
There’s a ton of helpful options for the toolbar. Just click on “Tools > Toolbar Options…” and explore all the different controls and shortcut button you can turn on and off.
Summon Your Inner Blog
Every user is given a sub-domain such as http://username.stumbleupon.com. StumbleUpon calls this page your “Blog.” This is basically your profile page. However there’s some real value in here. The blog helps keep everything you’ve found and done on StumbleUpon in one central place. You can post entries just like a normal blog, but you can also post videos, pictures, etc.
Each user’s blog houses all of their favorites, their tags, and allows for complete control of what content you show everyone. Use tags to find other users that are posting about things you like. Add these people as friends, and soon you’ll never be hitting that “Thumbs Down” button again.
Get Your GreaseMonkey On
In case you’ve been living under a GTD-proof rock the past few years, GreaseMonkey is every power user’s favorite Firefox extension that allows downloadable “Userscripts” to modify the appearance and behavior of any website. And StumbleUpon isn’t immune from the treatment. There are a number of awesome userscripts out there that will take your StumbleUpon sessions to the next level.
“Count StumbleUpon Likes” – This script will add the number of “Likes” (a Like on StumbleUpon is basically how many times someone has clicked the “Thumbs Up” button on the toolbar for that site) to the Preferences and About sections on the StumbleUpon site.
“StumbleUpon Tag Toplist” – This little puppy adds a button to each StumbleUpon profile which allows you to see some advanced statistics about each user’s tags. It will also display a list of the most used tags, and allow you to sort them alphabetically or by tag count.
And those are just the tip of the iceberg, make sure you check out our previous coverage of the subject in our post: “Top 12 Greasemonkey Scripts for StumbleUpon”
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