Su.pr is a URL shortening service similar to TinyURL, Snipr, and dozens of other services that let you take a long URL and condense it into just a few characters to share in an email, Twitter message, Facebook status update, or anywhere else.

But there are few things that set Su.pr apart. First, like Bit.ly, Su.pr offers analytics that let you know how many times users have clicked on your links. And second, Su.pr is run by web site discovery service StumbleUpon, and every time you shorten a link, you also add a web-based StumbleUpon toolbar to the link that lets users vote on the story. In other words, when you shorten a link through Su.pr, you're not only able to share it with the few dozen friends who read your Twitter updates, but if they like it enough they can vote it up and brings thousands of StumbleUpon visitors.

Up until recently, the service was only available to a small group of beta testers. But today Su.pr dropped the beta label, and with it the need for an invitation to use the service. Anyone can use Su.pr to shorten a link. But you can also login with a StumbleUpon account to keep track of your data and if you want to post updates directly to Twitter using Su.pr, you'll need to enter your Twitter login info.

[via TechCrunch]

A few years ago eBay went on a buying spree and started snatching up companies ranging from Skype to StumbleUpon. While it made plenty of sense for eBay to acquire PayPal, a company that many eBay users were already using to facilitate financial transactions, Skype and StumbleUpon seemed like odd fits.

Sure, you could try to figure out a way to use a social web site discovery tool to promote auctions, and you could use Skype's communication tools to encourage communication between buyers and sellers. But both Skype and StumbleUpon seemed like square pegs in eBay's round hole.

Now hot on the heels of news that Skype's founders are exploring the possibility of buying their company back from eBay comes news that StumbleUpon's founders did buy their company back.

StumbleUpon is now back in th ehands of founders Garret Camp and Geoff Smith and a new group of investors. The official reason for the buyback? Camp says "there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses." We could have told them that two years ago. Oh wait, we did.

[via TechCrunch]

Hot on the heels of Digg's new short URL feature StumbleUpon's founder has announced - albeit somewhat cryptically - that they may be working on their own truncation tool. "su.pr is coming," reads the Twitter update, though the link currently redirects to StumbleUpon.com.

The moves definitely make sense for both sites. With so many Twitter users sharing links via shortened URLs, it presents an excellent opportunity for Digg and StumbleUpon to drive more traffic back to their sites.

It remains to be seen if su.pr will stand out from the pack - there are so many good truncators available already that StumbleUpon will need to offer something unique. Of course, simply adding a button to their wildly popular toolbar is a good place to start.

[via TechCrunch]

It looks like Digg is working on a StumbleUpon-like toolbar that lets users digg, bury, or find related stories while surfing the web. Veronica Belmont first spotted a screenshot of the toolbar on Flickr, and it looks like the folks at TechCrunch managed to track down some additional information about it.

If that info is correct, here's how it works. Users will see a toolbar the toolbar pop up on their screens. The toolbar shows up in an i-frame, which means it's not browser specific and you can make it go away at any time just by hitting the X button.

When you visit pages that have already been submitted to Digg, you'll see the number of votes it has received. Or you can submit the page you're currently on. You can also bury stories or see related stories.

The toolbar will also create a shortened URL for any page you're visiting, beginning with digg.com... You can then share this shortened URL via email, Twitter, Facebook, or other services much the same way you would with TinyURL.

The Digg toolbar is not available to the general public at this point. And for all we know, the whole thing could just be a hoax. But it certainly seems like something Digg could and/or should offer in the future.

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.