Plurkshop 16: StumbleUpon

This past Monday, we had our 16th Plurkshop. This was the first one I’ve hosted, so I’ll admit, I was a bit nervous, especially since it was also the first Plurkshop in over a month.

Nowsourcing was also on hand to help answer questions, which I greatly appreciated. He started the discussion off by suggesting that people share their SU profiles, which lead to a discussion on adding people as friends.

For years, if I followed you and you followed me on StumbleUpon, we were considered friends. There were 2 problems with that though.

1) SU had a 200 person follow limit, so you needed to be careful about who you added, and

2) friends affected what pages you’d see if you clicked the stumble button, so following a RL (real life) friend might mean you’d get pages you weren’t really interested in.

Recently SU made a major change that addressed both of these issues.

First they removed the limits! Now on SU, you can follow as many people as you want.

Second, they separated friends and followers. Now I can choose whether I want to see what my friends are stumbling or whether I just want to be friends with them. By choosing to follow someone, you’re saying you want to see their stumbles.

The nice thing about friend requests is that you are sent a message on SU advising that so-and-so wants to add you as a friend. You don’t get that notification about followers, and have to look to see who’s new on your Subscribers page (add /fans/ when you’re at your SU home page to see your subscribers).

Keli asked “What are the basic differences between SU and Digg?” Ethnicomm suggested a great article by Tim Nash that I hadn’t read before, but explains the differences well. (Thanks, ethnicomm!)

Nowsourcing went on to explain that “StumbleUpon is more like a discovery engine, like channel surfing on TV. Digg is more of the crowd effect.”

LChamp asked “What is the benefit of the SU community?”

SU is great about helping to get the word out about topics that interest you. When a page first gets discovered, it is added to the system to be shared with others. If your page is tagged correctly, the people who see it will be people with similar interests.

In addition, if you write a review about the page, that review is added to the Recent Reviews of everyone who follows you. If they like the page and also add a review, that review will go out to everyone who follows them, and so on and so forth.

Gassho asked “Does everyone find that most visitors from SU tend to stay .01 seconds?”

Nowsourcing mentioned that he had found SU traffic to have one of the lowest bounce rates of the large social media sites and both sonnygill and sleepymarci agreed. We discussed again the importance of making sure that your page is catorgized correctly so that you’re getting visitors who are interested in exactly what your blog is about.

Sonnygill asked about the many features of the toolbar. Unfortunately, both nowsourcing and I have changed our toolbars from the default, so instead I recommended the free ebook Using the Toolbar which goes into each part of the toolbar in detail.

BarbaraKB clarified: a “thumb down means, ‘I don’t wanna see more like this’ rather than ‘this is an awful site’ and a review means others read the reason?”

To which I replied “Yep. And a thumb up means I really like this and want to see more like it.”

Aivzdog added “Stumbleupon is my life…almost.

Finally, I wanted to mention that trading stumbles or asking specifically for stumbles for a site is against their TOS. This surprised people and questions ranged from “Can they enforce that?” by LChamp to “Why do they have the sendto then?” by nowsourcing.

As far as I know, they’ve mainly enforced it with sites designed to trade stumbles, but that doesn’t mean they won’t decide to in the future. As far as the sendto page, I think it is to share interests with your friends, not send out group stumble requests.

Nowsourcing mentioned that “the more evil sites out there just have random people stumbling ya. Use them and prepare to be banned, your site too.”

Here’s the link to read more about what StumbleUpon has to say regarding requesting stumbles.

I added that I love when friends send me pages they think I’ll like. It’s fun seeing what they’ve found.

There’s a quite a bit more discussion in the Plurkshop thread, I’ve tried to hit most of the highlights here. If you have any questions, please let me know and I’ll try to answer them. It’s likely someone else is wondering the same thing.

If you’d like to add me on Plurk or SU or any other social site, please feel free. I love meeting new friends!

If you’re not on Plurk yet, but would like to try it, here is my link. It will add you as a fan, but please click the “Add Teeg as a friend” button and request friendship, I’d love to get to know you!