stumble upon

i stumbled upon the most amazing site today…

it is called…, wait for it…., wait for it…, stumbleupon and i think it is the best thing since bread came sliced.

From the moment I followed a link from Mark Shuttleworth’s blog over there I knew this was gonna be somewhere I would linger for a long time. I have already made friends and people with similar interests are easy to find. Just fill out your profile, put in what you like and what you are interested in, load up a photo and see the magic happens. Everything is tagged, so you see people with the same music, book, movie and hobby interests as yourself, you can then choose to visit their profile page, and depending on what you see, you can link to them as friends, make contact through stumble upon’s own online messaging system. Awesome.

One thing about StumbleUpon is the absence of mindless crap and teenage fluff so characteristic of many social networking sites today. The type of people hanging out at SU is decent, intelligent folks and there is no problem with spam and trolling and any such nonsense. Also, the way the site works is evidence that a lot of thought and planning has gone into it. You can flag anything you come across as adult or R-rated, you can report spam, abuse and other undesirable stuff from the tollbar as one of the options, and you can block any annoying or undesirable elements’ profile from seeing or hearing or receiving anything from them. I have yet to see such safeguards work so well and effective in preventing crap from ruining your social web experience on other sites.

No commercial fluff either. I am amazed at having made quite a few friends just in the few days I have been on there, whatever it is that you have put in your profile as being a favourite, it is cross-indexed and searchable and tagged, so you can click on any of your favourite books, movies, author, music and you are presented with a network of Stumblers that share similar interests.

The messaging system is awesome, each one has his/her own inbox and you can contact any person and the message are sent to their inbox on the SU server, no privacy is invaded and never does anyone know your real e-mail, you keep the communication strictly on SU.

It works best with the Firefox add-on, you get a functional toolbar, and a totally awesome website is just a click away.  Upon finding what you like, you can review it by clicking the toolbar or right-clicking on an image and it is inserted along with your review, which is very convenient and easy to do.

Here is my own little corner on Stumble Upon, go there and see what pages I have reviewed and subscribe to my feed…:)