stumble upon

May 14, 2003 11:04 AM

Stumble upon - a browser extended surfing tool. Based on your interest profile. I was ISO a random site finder, this one came up. What think ye?
posted by yoga (5 comments total)

Didn't Alexa already fail at this?

I love this thing though. Been using it...oh since that first time it was posted.
posted by mnology at 11:24 AM on May 14, 2003

Smells like a customer profiling tool to me. Voluntary spyware, as it were.
posted by Mwongozi at 11:42 AM on May 14, 2003

Double or not, spyware or not, I find the idea of searching for a random site finder highly amusing.
posted by hippugeek at 11:43 AM on May 14, 2003

I've been using StumbleUpon for a while, having found it while looking for fun Mozilla plugins. It's actually entertaining if you have nothing else to look at (or can't remember what you sat down at the computer to do). I haven't found the ratings helpful at all, though.

It reminds me a lot of the old eTour website, which also offered prizes for surfing, or something. (I think I got a gift certificate through them.) Unfortunately eTour became ProLaunch which was bought by Ask Jeeves, etc.

But yeah, StumbleUpon is a good toy. And having corresponded with the author, I'm pretty certain it's not for profiling anything. They don't collect enough data to care. It's not spyware.
posted by etoile at 11:44 AM on May 14, 2003

It probably qualifies as spyware, but it seems pretty benign. It never asked for an email address so it's not going to be sending me any spam. It never asked me to register so any information it collects will be as bulk statistics, not individual statistics. Any peer moderated ranking system is by definition capable of being labelled spyware. I'll put my tinfoil hat away for the people that sneak spyware in, such as gator or whatever that crap is.

Hmm, this is odd. I had posted a comment already to this posting but it's gone. Maybe I forgot to submit after previewing.
posted by substrate at 11:52 AM on May 14, 2003