How To: Make The Best Use of StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon, since its launch in 2001, has managed to capture a lot of people’s imagination. Reading a tag line “Discover your web“, surely it does that service. One very unique feature of StumbleUpon is the ability to view random websites anytime based on your preferences.

The Toolbar

Once you have a StumbleUpon account, just download the StumbleUpon toolbar. It is available as a plugin for both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. However Safari and Chrome are yet to have plugins for this. The Stumble button in the toolbar takes you to a random website. The Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down buttons lets you add or remove websites from your favorite lists. The Channel section of the toolbar allows you to view sites in different categories and sub categories.

Select Your Interests

Manage your Interests section allows you to view content based on your needs. Select from the wide range of interests and save your preferences.

Rate and Review
The rating system is very smart. Everytime you provide a rating you will see more of what you like as the unwanted stuffs are filtered out.

The review system also brings in content what you like.More the reviews you give, more is the relevant content you will see on your screen.

Make Friends

As with any other Social Networking site, StumbleUpon allows you to make friends. But the interesting thing again here is that, the more friends you make more content in which you are interested will be shown. Well, yes StumbleUpon uses your friends interests and yours to make a combination of them. So make friends having similar interests.

Spice Up Your Profile
Every user is given a domain url. A simple example would be http://yourname.stumbleupon.com . StumbleUpon calls this as your blog. However this is basically your profile. You can use this to post entires, pictures, videos and more. You can also use tags to find out what others are posting around your likes.