How to Stumble

StumbleUpon is a website that acts as a recommendation engine. Ever stumble upon Pandora? Well StumbleUpon is to websites what Pandora is to music. However it has a social network aspect to it as well. This new website gives you recommended websites to visit based upon a profile you fill out when you sign up for the service (which is free).

Getting started with StumbleUpon is relatively simple. You give them an email address, user name (be wise in this choice as it is permanent), password, and your date of birth (presumably this is to steer you to age-appropriate websites but read the privacy and usage agreements to fully understand the implications). Then you fill out your interests on quite a large variety of topics and then you can get to "stumbling". On the site, you can "stumble" to websites that are tailored to your interests. You can even save your favorite sites to your StumbleUpon favorites.

Another aspect of StumbleUpon website is to find online friends that you connect to in order to further enhance the sites StumbleUpon sends you to as well as get recommendations from your online friends.

There is also a toolbar that you can install that works with your browser. It has a "stumble" button as well as rating buttons, friends buttons, sharing buttons among others. It is meant to streamline your StumbleUpon experience and embed the functionality of the website itself within your browser.

StumbleUpon seems like a dream for the web surfer. You get tailored website recommendations. There is a randomness to which site you are sent to that gives just enough to make one curious. However, you can also get result from a search engine which, while not tailored to your personal preferences, also lets the web surfer pick and choose which sites to explore.