Talk:StumbleUpon

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[edit] eBay Update

Why is there no mention of potential business deals in the page? I'm an avid stumble user, and I can tell you that people talk about it nonstop. Everyone's saying eBay just bought or is currently in the process of buying Stumbleupon, but I haven't seen anything official yet. Anyone care to check this? 76.179.235.134 22:00, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Further to the comment above, the news is now official. eBay has bought Stumbleupon. Can someone please update the page accordingly? Thanks 217.33.234.250 07:53, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copyright Infringement

Hey frazzydee, I saw that you flagged StumbleUpon as a copyright infringement. I'm the original author of the text at http://www.stumbleupon.com/technology.html, and I give consent for wikipedia to use it. Once its back in place I'll get some other stumbleupon members to improve the description... [[User:gmc|gmc (talk)]] 20:40, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I'm reverting the page to before the copyright notice was put into place. If you go to the founders page on stumbleupon.com, and click on gmc, it redirects to a page about him, where User:Gmc is listed as his wikipedia account. That's all the information I think is nessesary. -Frazzydee 01:20, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Have there been any privacy issues? Google for example is accused for customising results based on a user's IP address and this is considering privacy violation. Pictureuploader 10:55, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Just updated the picture. VJ Emsi 10:57, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Advertisement

It is said in the article that "A small proportion of the 'stumbles' users come across (typically less than 2%) are sponsored pages matching their topics of interest." It is not clear from this description whether such content is labeled as adertisement. Can users tell whether the pages they get are "genuine" or ads?

It's not labelled as advertising no - essentially, many of these pages are in the system anyway as regular stumbles, the "sponsor" status simply means that the site owners pay to have the frequency with which the page appears to stumblers increased to some degree. So the sponsored page itself isn't advertising, as such - that page would appear eventually anyway. It is the increased frequency with which the page is srumbled that the advertisers are paying for. CastorQuinn 05:45, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
There's an icon which appears on the toolbar to identify a sponsored site. Such sites are very infrequent, in my experience certainly less than 2%.

[edit] Selfref?

Is the external link to the Stumbleupon page for Wikipedia a Wikipedia:Self-reference? 70.24.212.140 02:34, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, but it's not a problem here. "I" is a self-referential word that doesn't occur in articles, but it's major in your autobiography. I wouldn't hav bothered with the indirection. If this user promotes or wrote or hosts the search enjin, then they might as well stick to one account. BrewJay (talk) 07:18, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Downtime

StumbleUpon continues to be down, I would have to agree that it is pretty relevant, given the stiff competition among online social communty companies.--M4bwav 02:13, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

StumbleUpon is no longer down, and User:Zoe rm'd my section about it. Seems good. aubrey 03:54, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree about the relevance of a community site going down for days. I still can't get into Stumbleupon. Is there any explanation for this? Mabuse 18:45, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
It's going up and down, slow and fast. Whatever they did, they totally screwed up the system. If I ever find an article about it, I will immediately enter the relevant information under a subheading. I think if there is an article you can't deny it's relevance.--M4bwav 20:32, 9 May 2006

(UTC)


Stumble Upon is now back to normal and just as efficient as it was before the maintenance procedure. 20:59, May 10, 2006 Kapka1

[edit] Blogs

There are numerous references to 'blogs' in this article. I can accept the definition of the user page as a blog of sites stumbled with comments by the user, but it's a bit of a stretch to call a very straight-forward web forum (the interest groups mentioned) a 'community blog' - it's pretty clearly a forum. It seems like there is an effort here ot describe SU as a 'blogging community', which in my extensive experience with SU (sponsor for three years and counting) is very much not the case. In fact pressure from the users actually caused the developers to rename the user 'blog', as 'blog' was seen to give the wrong impression to users. I will consider rewording these references to blogs to retarget the article away from the impression of a 'community of bloggers' - comments welcome, especially from anyone who disagrees. CastorQuinn 14:04, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Go for it. I haven't used SU since I switched from Firefox to Opera, so I thought maybe it had changed to be more blog-like. Otherwise I might have changed it myself. Dvd Avins 14:24, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
Okay, I've made just a couple of edits: the profile pages have been restyled 'blog-style records of rated sites' rather than simply as 'weblogs' - the idea being that the profile is not refered to as a blog site-internally, and while actual blog entries are possible, the profile content is usually more in the style of a record of sites stumbled, with comments, so SU is not a blogging community, as the article seemed to be suggesting; also the SU groups have been reworded as 'community forums' rather than 'community blogs', since they are very definitely forums, with threads and posts, and user names showing up with each post. I think that communicates the idea and community of SU a little more accurately. CastorQuinn 01:04, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Peer-to-peer

I've altered the opening sentence of this article to remove the likening of SU to 'peer-to-peer' networks. The original line read:

which integrates peer-to-peer and social networking principles with one-click blogging.

From Peer-to-peer: a network that relies primarily on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively low number of servers ... A pure peer-to-peer network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients" and "servers" to the other nodes on the network ...

SU does have a definite concept of 'server' and 'client' in its architecture. Stumbles (pages sent to the user when they activate the 'Stumble' button on the toolbar) are 'fetched' from a central server, which uses an algorithm to determine which pages to send to each user. As already noted in this talk page, SU can experience 'downtime' whenever these central servers are taken offline for maintainance - something that shouldn't be possible on a peer-to-peer network, where each active node functions as a server.

I believe the 'peer-to-peer' reference is intended to reflect the fact that the content of SU is generated by the users, not by the developers/servers/system. Individual users enter pages into the SU database, and evaluate those pages (user ratings are factored into the algorithm to determine which sites are shown to which users). In this sense the content of the system could be seen to be collaborative - as is explained later in the article. I don't believe comparing SU to 'the principles of peer-to-peer networking' is the best way to communicate this idea, since the primary connotation of peer-to-peer is 'a serverless network', not 'peer-generated content'.

I've altered this line to mention 'peer networking', rather than 'peer-to-peer networking' - I believe this communicates the idea more clearly, and this term is used elsewhere in the article.

CastorQuinn 00:45, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

The early versions of this page read like they were copied straight frmo marketing tripe. I think the peer-to-peer reference was there becuase it sounded cool and was sort of maybe halfway accurate. Dvd Avins 02:54, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Competition

This page should link to the other similar services. It seems similar to del...iocious(sp?) and google notepad to me. Mathiastck 21:16, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Ok well I'll at least list the competition here on the talk page. digg, MySpace_News (displaying my bias). Mathiastck 22:55, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Unofficial FAQ

The Unofficial FAQ is partly inaccurate (and growing more inaccurate) and doesn't get updated any longer. Furthermore, the SU Help is incorporating more and more stuff from the unofficial FAQ. I don't think hat it's necessary to have the link here.

Yep, well spotted. The unofficial FAQ isn't updated anymore. A link to the official FAQ and possibly the Help forum should be enough. CastorQuinn 23:11, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
I've made this change: Unofficial FAQ out, Official FAQ in. CastorQuinn 23:21, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inappropriate tone

I think I'm going to tag this for inappropriate tone. This article reads like an ad. --AceMyth 17:54, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Any suggestions about how we could actually do that? It doesn't seem all that much like an ad to me - what could be changed to fix that? At the moment it's pretty much a summary of the way the thing works. I've actually studiously avoided anything that isn't relevent to the encyclopedic quality of the article, and a couple of us have weeded out buzzwords from the original. Any actual suggestions to guide us here? CastorQuinn 23:14, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
A good article, I think, takes the reader from a state where they're not familiar with a subject to a state where they are; this one puts way too many obstacles in this desired path by pounding the reader with compact, abstract, oblique and technical language while failing to explain anything in-between. Who started this thing, when, how, why, what is it like using it, what kind of response has it received, how is it like or not like other similar services (contemporary and past)? This article should explain these kinds of things in a structured, base-to-top manner, and very preferably do it in a way that a person could still leave knowing more than when they entered even if they're not absolutely familiar with what an "intuitive social framework" or a "collaborative filtering process" is. I don't pretend to have some magic cure for this article, but I think "context" is a key word for what would be an excellent starting point. --AceMyth 21:14, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] StumbleThru

This section on StumbleThru seems far too much like advertising. StumbleThru is not a significant feature (on a par with SUV, which is significant only for the deal with Wii), or significantly different to the primary stumble tool and process, to warrent a whole subsection describing it. A single line - eg "... as well as the ability to stumble through certain specific sites" - would contain all the information I think is necessary to communicate this feature. I'll leave this while awaiting comment, and move to remove this section and replace with a smaller sentence in an existing section in about a week. CastorQuinn 14:13, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism

stumbleupon.com's use of unconventional site design, invalid markup and unreasonable management renders them a prime candidate for website criticism.

SITE DESIGN: StumbleUpon's site design doesn't seem to follow traditional protocol. One must familiarize themselves with StumbleUpon's innovative UI to properly navigate the website and it's many options. This process can be very cumbersome and time consuming, requiring the user to make several inquiries to the Help Forum and/or study of their 14,145 word FAQ.

CODING: The StumbleUpon website contains an abundance of invalid markup, broken links, server errors, slow page load times and incompatibility with certain web browsers.

UNREASONABLE POLICY: StumbleUpon's policy is forever changing without notice and staff members are quick to moderate. They often delete Help Forum inquiries to save face and appear without flaw. StumbleUpon is known to terminate accounts to those brave enough to challenge site policy.

Because the magnitude of the StumbleUpon community is the largest, there are few alternatives. One may deduct that StumbleUpon can afford to neglect the needs of their users.

Monacco 13:24, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

While you may be right that these things make them a possible target for criticism (as it happens, I think your claims are incorrect, but that's just my opinion versus yours), has there actually been any significant criticism that could be cited in such a section of the article? I've seen criticism inside the community of every change, good and bad, as well as every lack of change, but none of that is citable. The only criticisms I've seen on tech blogs is from non-significant blogs, and usually comes from bloggers who attempted to use SU to increase their own traffic and were met with hostility, so they are not credible sources. If there are any significant and informed criticisms out there, then we could definitely use them to build a section on criticisms - the article would certainly be more complete if we had such a section, but unless there actually is such criticism, we can't really write up a section on it. Have you found any citations that could be used as a basis for a criticisms section? CastorQuinn (talk) 03:59, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] World's worst website? World's most confusing website?

Those are 2 categories for guiness, its a 100% win for sure :D

[edit] Launch Date

No where in the article does it mention when Stumble Upon was founded. The home page says copyright 2001 - 2008. I believe this information is relevant and should be added to the page. I, however, cannot find a more concrete date as to when the software went public. -76.16.200.83 (talk) 00:58, 25 April 2008 (UTC)