StumbleUpon may be one of the most innovative social website discovery services around. But the service has always had one major stumbling block: users needed to sign up for accounts and install a browser toolbar. And some percentage of potential users are just never going to take those steps.

Now StumbleUpon has removed those restrictions by rolling out a new version of the site that works without a browser toolbar. Just visit StumbleUpon and click on any web page to start stumbling. A JavaScript toolbar will show up in your browser window. You can find popular new web sites by hitting the stumble button, give stories a thumbs up, or rank them. If you have a StumbleUpon account you can also save pages. If not, hitting the save button will bring up an account registration screen.

It's also easier to find web sites from the main StumbleUpon page thanks to new categories like News, Art, Computers, Music, and Technology.

You can still use the toolbar if you like. But with the new StumbleUpon, it's no longer necessary.

[via WebWare]

Update: As C.K. Sample points out, the new toolbar-free StumbleUpon seems to be a ways off. When you visit the page, you will indeed find a JavaScript based toolbar that lets you stumble pages. But only if you're not logged into your account. When you click the stumble button, you're shuffled through a small group of pages, not the full StumbleUpon universe. And there's no way to save pages as favorites.

Thinking about switching from Firefox or Internet Explorer to the Opera web browser, but can't imagine life without the StumbleUpon toolbar? StumbleUpon has yet to release an official toolbar or plugin for Opera. And while there is certainly a way to rank web pages and discover new pages without a toolbar, it's rather inelegant.

Opera Stumbler is a third party plugin that gives you all the same features you'd expect from the toolbar, sans the toolbar. There are several different ways to use Opera Stumbler. You can install the menu button, which adds a StumbleUpon menu to Opera.

If you'd rather have toolbar buttons, you can install a series of buttons for common tasks like giving a page a thumbs up or thumbs down. These buttons can be dragged and dropped onto any Opera toolbar. You can also add a Stumble option to your Opera Speed Dial bookmarks.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

StumbleUpon is a web discovery service that makes it easy to find cool and interesting web sites. All you have to do is install a browser toolbar and start hitting the "stumble" button whenever you're bored. The service also begins to get a sense of your tastes as you give various pages a thumbs up or down.

But there's at least one problem with StumbleUpon: There're no toolbar for Opera, Safari, or any web browsers besides Internet Explorer and Firefox. So what's a bored Opera users to do? Well, fortunately StumbleUpon has a nifty demo feature that lets you stumble pages using a virtual toolbar. All you have to do is enter http://www.stumbleupon.com/demo/#url= into your browser's URL window, and then add the site that you want to start at. For example, http://www.stumbleupon.com/demo/#url=http://www.downloadsquad.com/.

You should now see a virtual toolbar with all the features of the regular StumbleUpon toolbar. But since this is just a demo, you can't actually vote on sites or submit new sites. And there's no way to enter your account information. But you can hit the stumble button as many times as you like.

[via Digital Inspiration]

While we're still waiting for Digg to roll out a dedicated image section, many of the top 'stories" submitted to social news sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us are funny, interesting, or beautiful images. Picurls collects the all and makes it easy to find some of the most viewed pictures of the day from popular websites.

Picurls pulls images from all of the sites we mentioned, plus Flickr, Simpy, Furl, Boing Boing, and Wired.

You can also subscribe to RSS feeds for images from each website, or all websites. There are discussion links next to each image, but Picurls doesn't seem to have a very active community. There's not a single comment next to any image on the front page today.

While Picurls does provide a handy service fro finding popular images, it's a bit troubling that the site links only to the original image source, and not to the Digg, Reddit, or Del.icio.us submission page. If this site picks up steam, we suspect the big wigs at those social news/bookmarking sites might have a few complaints.

[via makeuseof]

Social bookmarking/web discovery site StumbleUpon maintains a list of user statistics. It just doesn't make that list available to the public. So if you want to see who the most active or popular stumblers are, StumbleUpon won't tell you.

That's where StumbleRank comes in. The unofficial page comes from blogger Muhammad Saleem of ProNet Advertising. The site shows the StumbleUpon users who have submitted the most pages, photos, videos and reviews, as well as the stumblers with the largest number of "fans."

Because the list doesn't come from StumbleUpon, don't expect an accurate list of all the actual top stumblers. You only get added to the list if someone submits your username. The site then checks your StumbleUpon profile and updates the list. As time goes by, we suspect more and more names will get added making StumbleRank a fairly reliable measure of StumbleUpon popularity.

[via Mashable]

StumbleUpon is moving beyond the browser toolbar. The social ranking service lets users give web sites a thumbs up or down, write reviews, and find random popular websites by clicking a "Stumble!" button.

Now StumbleUpon is launching a SearchReviews feature that will allow users to see StumbleUpon member reviews next to search results from Google, Yahoo!, Ask, Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube. If you've got the StumbleUpon toolbar installed, you may already be seeing the little green SU box next to selected search results. If not, click Tools, then Toolbar Options. Next click the configuration tag and check the box that says "Highly recommended search results."

Because millions StumbleUpon users have been ranking pages for the past few years, the system already has a pretty good list of rankings for many of the web sites, images, and videos you're likely to find during your daily searches. So if you trust the wisdom of crowds and only click on links with positive ratings, SearchReviews could make search engines a lot more useful.

On the other hand, since StumbleUpon is really just overlaying their data on top of Google and other pages in your search browser, the service has no control over what pages you find when using popular search engines. For example, the most popular page among StumbleUpon users for a particular topic might be buried on Google's 5th page of search results, in which case you'll never find it using SearchReviews.

The StumbleUpon Toolbar works with Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Click To Play

Fichey is a new web discovery service. But unlike digg, reddit, Fichey doesn't let you submit and share web sites with other users. Rather, it lets you find popular stories from digg, reddit, StumbleUpon and other sites.

What Fichey provides is a simple Flash-based tool for flipping through web pages. You won't actually be taken to those pages, you remain on Fichey's site the whole time while screenshots of the day's top stories are loaded. Because of this, the pages don't load like normal web pages. Rather when you click a button to see the next page, an image is loaded into the Flash interface using transition effects.

While the service isn't really that useful for anyone who wants to, you know, actually visit the web sites you're reading about, the presentation is quite remarkable. To be honest, the screencast above doesn't really do the site justice, because it was recorded at a low framerate, so we suggest you just go check Fichey out for yourselves for a moment. And then move along.

[via TechCrunch]

Normally when we write something like "Facebook hopes to be the next Google," we mean that metaphorically. But in the case of Streakr, we're not kidding. The only way it could become more like Stumbleupon would be to change its name to StumbleUpon. Oh yeah, and to develop a larger user base.

Streakr has a familiar concept. Install a browser toolbar and give a thumbs up to pages you like and thumbs down to pages you dislike. You can find "friends" with similar tastes and check out their lists of favored sites. And you can click the "browse" button to discover sites others have submitted.

The biggest problem with Streakr right now, (beside its lack of originality) is the fact that there are very few users signed up, while StumbleUpon has over 2 million registered users. A social web discovery site thrives on its user community. If nobody's submitting links, there's nothing for your to find.

[via WebWare]

It's fairly inarguable that Firefox needs to exist. Going back just a few years ago to when Mozilla introduced what would quickly become their flagship browser, much of the internet was in the equivalent of the digital dark ages. Netscape was struggling along after Internet Explorer had successfully derailed its efforts years ago, but even IE was suffering from a stagnating development process and an industry that was trying to move forward with efforts in standards and compatibility. Sure, Opera was always on the outer fringes, but its market share hasn't really seen much of the leap that its devoted following believes it deserves.

Along comes Firefox in 2004, and everything changes. Netscape drops even farther off the list of many a user, and Internet Explorer begins slowly, but steadily, losing market share to the open source Mozilla alternative that opened up the public's eye to the wonders of extensions and add-ons. It is at this moment in time, however, when Firefox also began to slowly replace Internet Explorer as a dominant and, in some ways, proprietary force on the web.

In 2007, Firefox certainly hasn't destroyed IE's market share, but it sure has made a dent. While that's a positive thing in the name of choice and the triumph of good software, Firefox has quite possibly made a negative impact on the development of web sites and software when viewed in the context of accessibility. Think about it: before Firefox, most websites were not only 'optimized' for IE, you pretty much had to view them in IE if you wanted to see anything more than the equivalent of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle blown apart with a shotgun. Even though it could be argued that web design standards have come quite a ways since then (and they certainly have), the damage done from Firefox's wild popularity among the tech savvy (and even not-so-savvy) primarily lies in this new frontier of web apps and services.

Looks like the rumors were true. Auction site eBay is shelling out $75 million to buy social web discovery service StumbleUpon.

According to the press release, the acquisition gives eBay exposure to StumbleUpon's growing community of over 2 million users. Still seems like an awkward match to us. In recent years, eBay purchased PayPal, but that was a no-brainer, and Skype, which has an obvious commercial aspect.

The company hardly needed StumbleUpon to build its brand recognition. And if they just start injecting eBay auctions willy nilly into stumble results, they'll pretty much break the community they bought as members begin to evacuate the spam-laden sinking ship. Still, a separate "stumble to find books, computer parts, or hummels" section could make a lot of sense.

eBay senior director Michael Buhr assumes the post of general manager of StumbleUpon, while StumbleUpon's current management team remains in place.

A few weeks ago we told you that eBay was in talks to buy StumbleUpon. And then nothing happened for a while. Well, stuff happened, but the biggest announcement involving eBay was probably the new Firefox Companion for eBay.

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that the talks are on, and that auction company could be prepared to shell out $75 million for the social web discovery service. There's no final agreement on the table yet, and the deal could still fall through.

As Duncan Riley at TechCrunch points out, this an interesting move for eBay. The company has already purchased Paypal and Skype, but those are both companies that can be integrated into an online auction service. StumbleUpon lets users discover new websites by clicking a Stumble! button on their browser toolbar. Unless eBay wants a new way for users to find random junk for sale (which you can already do pretty easily), this seems like a departure from eBay's usual offerings.

How often have you been using the StumbleUpon toolbar to find random sites on the internet when you stopped and said to yourself, wouldn't it be great if I could specify that I want to find random government web sites, or perhaps PBS pages?

Umm yeah. Well, meeting a demand that may not have existed, StumbleUpon has launched a new feature called StumbleThru.

Basically, you can go to the StumbleThru start page and click on Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, Blogspot, WordPress, The onion, PBS, Physorg, CNN, the BBC, .GOV, or .EDU. You'll be taken to a page that fits the description.

The selection's not exactly random. You'll only be taken to a site that's been rated highly by fellow stumblers. If you happen across a page fitting these criteria that you like during your non-stumbling adventures on the internet, you can use the StumbleUpon toolbar to give it a thumbs up, and presumably future StumbleThru users could be directed to that site. Another interesting thing to note is that once you click on Wikipedia, BBC, or any other StumbleThru selection, all the pages you Stumble to will be in that category until you select another category or reset your toolbar to "all."

In other news... there's no update yet on the rumor that eBay is purchasing StumbleUpon.

[via Mashable]

LeapTag is a new way to discover all of the content you are interested in. Its way to read RSS feeds that enables users to locate news, blogs, books and other sources of material that match personal interests. However, it is not an RSS feed reader.

Users can sign up and download a browser toolbar. Through this toolbar you subscribe to tags and topics. LeapTag then scowers the web and finds links that you might like. The system learns by how much you like the items, and improves the results it lays out.

The download for this application is quite heavy, and it is still in beta form so things could change. Not only does LeapTag require a browser based toolbar with a new sidebar, but it also requires a Windows or Mac application to keep things running. For an alternative check out StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us.

Well, now that it looks like StumbleUpon is worth something (possibly $40-45 million somethings), it should come as no surprise that Google wants in on the action.

That said, it's probably sheer coincidence that Google launched a recommendations button for Google Toolbar on the same day that news breaks that eBay is positioned to purchase StumbleUpon.

While both Google and StumbleUpon provide you with toolbar buttons that will take you to a wide variety of websites, they differ in how those sites are selected. StumbleUpon is a social network, so you visit sites rated highly by users with similar interests to your own. As you rate more and more sites, the odds increase that you'll only be sent to sites you like.

Google's new toolbar button (shaped like a pair of dice) takes you to a recommended page based on your search history. Google only promises up to 50 new sites per day, whereas you can stumble pretty much forever with StumbleUpon. To be honest, we weren't that impressed with the Google button's initial recommendations. Most of the selections were fairly obvious like Mozilla's Thunderbird homepage.

Google's also added a new recommendations feature for Google Personalized Homepage users. Click the "Add A Tab" button, type in "Recommendations" for the tab name, keeping the "I'm feeling lucky" box checked, and you'll get a page filled with recommendations updated every day.

Don't expect very much at the beginning, but the more you build up your search history, and the more you use these features, the better they'll become. Over time, we will give you more and better recommendations.

[via Google Blogoscoped]