It was the thought of putting one more add-on onto firefox that’s kept me away from StumbleUpon for so long, but today I made the leap.
However, after a few hours of StumblingUpon things - I’m still on the fence about whether or not I'll keep if for a couple reasons:
1. There is the possibility that I will be stumbling from now until eternity (it is a pretty fun way to discover stuff).
2. The interface just isn’t what I expected it to be and I got a little confused in the midst of my site discoveries.
For the sake of blogging, I’m going to focus on the problems with StumbleUpon as I see them – in hopes that someone will “stumbleupon” my suggestions. Why? Because I know that we always want feedback for our site – and enjoy a good round of constructive criticism. Also – I hope my critiques will help a few lost stumblers find their way to successful stumbling.
Here’s where I got tied up
Uploading a photo for my profile – after the upload – there was nothing to click to take me back to my profile – the page just said “photo uploaded successfully” – what did I do? Well, I just hit the stumble icon and went on my merry way.
Back up – just finding my profile for the first time. Yeah – seems simple enough – but the toolbar icons that look like they might lead to my profile actually lead to other stuff – I finally figured out that clicking on the star icon (my favorites) would lead me to one part of my profile and I’ve been using that to navigate back and forth. (click on my profile below to take a peek at what I've been stumbling).
Stumbling something new – like All the Write Sites – which turned out to be just about the easiest thing ever (just click the thumbs up icon and if no one else has discovered it you’ll get a chance to categorize and review it).What exactly does “adult” mean? When you stumble something – a question asks you to indicate whether it has adult content or not. So I was stumbling a friend's blog that includes a few curse words and figured that might be considered adult (I didn’t want someone to complain that I wasn’t labeling my stumbles correctly) so I clicked “yes” for adult. Well, little did I know that adult really just means “porn” and will actually just add the “porn” tag to that site – forever if you are the first one to stumble it. So – StumbleUpon – if you mean porn why don’t you just say it? Otherwise well-intentioned folks like myself try to be honest and end up mislabeling content.
I also don’t know why every time I give a site a rating now I get directed to a page with other people that felt the same way I did about it – I’d rather not see those people because frankly I don’t care who else liked
This picture of the world at night – or this time-lapse cityscape.
Not that I don’t want to make new friends – just that I’d rather see more web content than more web profiles. Anywho I think I can turn that function off – I was just
So - for those who are wondering if StumbleUpon is worth the investment (it's free) - it probably is - but don't be afraid to stumble around the toolbar a bit until you have it figured out.
