how is Stumble Upon different, and how do we use it?

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site. It’s a place where people go to exchange websites that they find interesting, write reviews about it and share it with other users. However, most social bookmarking sites eventually bring you to their site where you can save / share your bookmarks.

StumbleUpon, on the other hand, works with a toolbar that you need to install on your browser, for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Once you start the toolbar, you can use it for several stuff. First of all, you can rate the websites that you visit by clicking “I like it!” or “I don’t like it.” So you can give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to the websites that you visit. That’s basically how the rating process takes place.

Now there’s another button called “Stumble”.

When you click on “Stumble!” you are going to see websites that other users with a similar profile to yours have rated as good. In other words, many other StumbleUpon users gave a “thumbs-up” to this site, so when you click “Stumble!” you’re shown the highest rated websites. What type of website / niche you’re shown depends on your user preferences, which you specify when you sign up buy you can also change it later.

Websites that get thumbs-down, then they won’t be shown to other users. You also have the option to use channels to stumble upon. So for example, if you select the web development channel, every time you click on “Stumble!,” you’re going to be presented with a website that was rated inside the web development category.

So you can pretty much filter down what kind of stuff you are looking for - that’s the advantage of StumbleUpon. You can get the best websites in a certain topic delivered to you just by clicking on “Stumble”..

The good thing about StumbleUpon is that the algorithm is really effective. I mean, if you just give a couple of stumbles and you see that the quality of the websites that you see will really be high.