14 DAY TRIAL // Social bookmarking hasn't exactly developed into the promise it once held but it's still somewhat popular with at least part of the users. StumbleUpon is one of the services that seemed to have a lot of potential but never really took off so it's understandable that it has been looking to reinvent itself for the past months. Now it’s coming out with a fresh new design but these aren't just new clothes; the service, while retaining its core functionality, has shifted towards search and discovery with a social twist.
“We have completely updated the interface, geared to be more simple, searchable and social. The new StumbleUpon preserves the functionality of the previous interface while adding frequently requested features, such as Search Your Favorites,” the announcement on the StumbleUpon blog reads. “Our goal was to make the site and the StumbleUpon Add-on easier to use and more intuitive for visitors and users. We’ve improved site navigation, and navigation within User Profiles, to make it easier and faster to find what you’re looking for. We also think it just looks a lot nicer.”
The most obvious change is definitely the new interface, which is somewhat cleaner and more spacey. For logged-in users, the homepage now features a stream of the pages their friends stumbled upon, a feature that, even if not very original (as Facebook, Twitter and especially FriendFeed offer somewhat similar functionality), is sure to be welcomed by users. If you cannot see the new design you can use this link to try it out.
The biggest change though is in the way the site is supposed to be used. Billed as a combination between Google and Twitter, StumbleUpon now allows users to search through all of the pages stumbled along the years, some 35 million of them, and content which their friends have stumbled or rated will be highlighted. Users can also filter their results to include everyone, just their friends or just the pages they stumbled upon in the past. The hope is that the social element will make the results more likely to be accurate and also that, seeing as how all of the links have been vetted by the users, some of the useless results they may get on Twitter should be filtered out. A new version of the StumbleUpon toolbar is also coming out this week.