Talkings of a Tyrant

The StumbleUpon extension for Mozilla Firefox is an excellent extension for websurfers who are on the lookout for new sites.

It is a toolbar with (*gasp!*) a bunch of buttons on it! It doesn’t seem all that complex, but you can do a lot with this simple toolbar.

When you hit that tempting button that says “Stumble,” Firefox will automatically be sent to some randomly awesome website on the web. Granted, some of these websites suck. Most of them don’t.

The thing is, whether web sites are good or bad is determined by what people do after they are sent there. Once at the web site (or at any web site you want) you can rate it favorably or not. Simple. The more sites you rate, the more good sites StumbleUpon will bring you to. It learns from you.

Once you get to that site, you can also tag the page. Yes, tag it. Decide what words fit it best and tag it. You can’t bookmark anything directly from StumbleUpon (as far as I can tell), but you can still tag sites.

Or, if tagging and giving a thumbs-up or down isn’t enough for you, you can give a full fledged review of the website.

Granted, there are some inherent security issues from telling StumbleUpon what sites you like to visit. But there are the same issues from searching Google, or using social bookmarking. Face it, it is nearly impossible to be truly anonymous on the web. Might as well get used to it.

While these might seem simple, it is really well done. This is possibly the most Web 2.0 extension out there. Democracy and user-control is almost hardwired into this thing.

The main downside to this extension is the registration process. Registering itself isn’t bad, but doing otherwise simple stuff like changing your password or having two profiles on the same Firefox is annoying.
A word of advice: Do not delete the Firefox profile that you originally created your StumbleUpon account on! If you delete it, or move to a new computer, you will not be able to change your password.

This extension is especially good for those who like to randomly surf the web. With StumbleUpon, you can do it in style! It is difficult to explain, but something about tagging and rating every site you come upon is incredibly appealing. Useful with a “Post to BlinkList/del.icio.us” bookmark on you bookmark toolbar the BlinkList toolbar so you can rate and bookmark what sites you visited.

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