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I stumbled upon a useful site earlier today that's worth sharing. Called SimilarWeb, this small Firefox (and soon Internet Explorer) add-on sits on the side of your browser and pulls up sites that are similar to the one you're currently on.
It works remarkably well--at least with major sites. For example, visiting YouTube brings up a long list of other video hosts. The same went for social news sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious. You can scroll through these and open them up in new tabs, or pick from one of the tags SimilarWeb believes to be related to that page. This will pull up an entirely new list of places it thinks you should visit.
What makes the service shine is that users can re-arrange the lists and submit new sites that are not yet in SimilarWeb's index. There are thumbs up and down buttons which can raise or lower a site's standing on the list. Down-voting any site will actually remove it from the list. As a result, if users continue to vote the list gets more accurate.
SimilarWeb tells you sites that are like the one you're on.
(Credit: CNET Networks)There is a notable downside to using this extension: your browsing performance will take a hit. For some reason it needs to load its own results before it loads the actual page, which in my case meant waiting an extra few seconds when visiting a new site. That might be a deal killer for some, although it can easily be avoided by learning the keyboard shortcut that dismisses it from running in the sidebar. You can also pull up the results from a drop down menu next to your browser's address bar.
SimilarWeb would make a good companion for the now toolbar-free StumbleUpon, which actually learns from your browsing habits to give you pages it thinks you'll like. Combined with this you'd get another avenue of exploration.
Here's an explanatory video from the site's about page. Worth noting is that you don't need to have your volume on.
SimilarWeb 3 from Similar on Vimeo.
StumbleUpon wears a lot of hats: random Web site surfer, social networker, social bookmarker, site reviewer. It's a powerful little add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer.
One click is all it takes to get going with this toolbar, which encourages random discovery on the Internet based on your interests. The "Stumble!" logo whips you around the Net, but at the your pace, based on categories you choose during installation. Hundreds of topics are available and can be updated at will, with no selection limit. Other StumbleUpon functions are just as user-friendly. A click on the toolbar's "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" icons make ratings a cinch, and another click is all it takes to share sites, to update the friends list, to view the rated pages list, to read reviews of the page, to peruse the menu, or to search the StumbleUpon database.
Newer features make it easier to block sites and topics that you never want to stumble across, for the first time or ever again. Occasional use pops up a proprietary nagging page asking to complete your profile if you haven't; StumbleUpon pushes the social aspect pretty hard although it's easy enough to ignore. If Web surfing is the new channel surfing, then StumbleUpon should be your remote.
On Tuesday night StumbleUpon is changing the way users interact with the service, ditching the need for a software-based browser toolbar in place of a small frame that loads on top of the Web site you're on. Users with the toolbar installed will still be getting the same experience, but the idea is that anyone can begin stumbling without having to install anything.
To get the Web toolbar to show up in the first place, users must now begin their stumbling experience from the StumbleUpon home page. The site is now broken up into categories. Once you've clicked on a link the experience begins, with the persistent toolbar following you from site to site and keeping track of your ratings to provide you with new stumbles.
Earlier this week, StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp told me this was an idea that had been kicked around the office for years--six in fact, and the only reason it hadn't happened sooner is that Camp and others felt it would diminish the number of people who were populating the service with rated content. That number is still staggering, with more than 35,000 new URLs submitted every day by 6 million registered users. Camp hopes this new install and registration-free solution will make those numbers even larger, and improve some of the uptake as people get to try the service without that first hurdle.
In addition to its exploratory angle, StumbleUpon is introducing a new partner program. Sites that have StumbleUpon installed will be able to offer their users a new "Stumble This" button with a counter on it. When a user clicks this it adds to the number, which can help promote it for other StumbleUpon members. It's also got an option right underneath the counter that lets users jump to another piece of related content, something Camp says should drive traffic to other existing posts. It's worth noting this is different from the previously existing StumbleThru feature, which would do this randomly.
StumbleUpon's new home page will serve as a starting point to various bits of media, and exploring it no longer requires a software toolbar. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: StumbleUpon)The partner program is launching on four sites Tuesday night, including political blogging network The Huffington Post, HowStuffWorks, Rolling Stone online, and National Geographic. Of the four, Rolling Stone and National Geographic are the most interesting, as users will be able to explore the photo archives with the service's recommendation engine. Like service Photoree, which we checked out back in August, this can be a fun and engaging experience.
Camp says there are 10 other partnerships in the works, including several for video and music content. Eventually the system will be open for anyone to place it on their blog, although Camp says the system needs to be fine-tuned before it's ready for that.
The future of StumbleUpon
When I asked Camp for comment on the rumored sale of StumbleUpon from parent company eBay, he said he "couldn't talk about any rumors." However, what's interesting is that this new system could be ported over to eBay, or any other product site, which is something many were expecting when the company was acquired last year. "This does open us up," he said. "We're a lot more media focused, and this would allow us to do product discovery."
Presumably with such a system in place you could jump around the site and discover new products while rating them at the same time--something the auction site does not currently provide. Camp says StumbleUpon might one day provide that, but for now he says that realm has already been covered pretty well by search. "(We're) more interested in doing media stuff. There's a greater need for discovery than products right now."
The new StumbleUpon.com should be available right now. Camp says user profiles, reviews, and friends lists will get updated to match the new style in the coming weeks.
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StumbleUpon, a fun Web discovery service, is getting a new feature, SearchReviews, that will take it beyond its historic role of hyperefficient time-waster. It could make it an integral part of the day-to-day browsing experience. SearchReviews pushes StumbleUpon ratings and other information into the search results pages on major search engines and content sites like Wikipedia, Google Reader, Flickr, and YouTube.
Users who run the StumbleUpon toolbar will now see little icons after search results on these sites that show them how popular a site is in the StumbleUpon community, the number of thumbs-up ratings it has, and who of their friends has rated the page.
It changes the way you look at search results pages. Now, instead of just looking at a sea of links in descending order based on what your search site thinks is most important, you also do a quick visual scan of the results for little StumbleUpon icons that indicate that actual humans have marked the page as worthwhile. If you happen across a site that a friend has flagged, you'll have an even better indication that the site is something that you'll want to check out.
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