StumbleUpon stumbles to determine user interest. We don't need match-makers anymore.

sido
2005-04-02T23:29:19Z

http://www.stumbleupon.com

StumbleUpon is a potentially very useful browsing tool for internet discovery. As they explain:

StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have liked. Unlike search engines or static directories, this allows for a true "democracy of the web" – all SU members have a say as to whether a page should be passed on.

Services like these are wonderful. We need more kinds like this to help people filter out "other". I'm always thinking about how very immense and pervasive the internet will be in the near future. I don't even think we'll refer to it as the internet, but "space". Kind of like artifical light back in the day, except now it's intelligent and networked.

However, there's one big problem with how StumbleUpon determines whether or not a user would be interested in a website. After registering, they want you to pick out 500 or so topics so that they can group you in with others who more or less picked the same topics.

This isn't social network-thinking, if that's their intention. This is like the difference between a Match.com and a Friendster.com. In the former, I'm choosing the qualities I want out of a list you have given me. In the social network model, you are analyzing my unique social environment and then analyzing which unknown others I can connect to.

All StumbleUpon has to do is allow me to import my list of favorite websites / web locations (from Furl or delicious, even), look at others with similar bookmarks, and simply tell me what most others have that I don't (and then drill down that list). I could even do it manually, looking at the list of others' who share my bookmarks on delicious, but it would take too long.