Don’t Just Surf… Stumble the Web!
Ever been in that position where you have an awful lot of time and all you’ve got to kill it is a computer with an internet connection? Well, of course you have! And, sure, you can stalk everyone on Facebook (even though you did that million times already… that very day) or check your Youtube subscriptions (most probably, nothing of interest would have been recently put up, just because you had time today). You could even blog! But, well, sometimes you just want to come across some stuff that strikes your interest and scan around, you know? Thanks to the internet being insanely vast, it is very likely Googling would give you more unwanted rather than wanted results. And, anyway, sometimes you do not want to Google… you just need something to magically appear on your computer screen and you need it to be interesting enough for you!
What am I getting at? StumbleUpon! This, my friends, is an extremely handy web utility that just does that: makes interesting stuff magically appear on your computer screen. Well, not really magically because you have to press a button, but still, pretty close, no?
You can use StumbleUpon right from its website, or, much more conveniently, through its Firefox extension like I do. To get started, you need to sign up with it and select a few areas of interest. There are 526 topics available to choose from as of now from categories as diverse as commerce, sci/tech, society, and sports. After selection of interests, you are set! However much time you may have, you can kill it, and that too mercilessly 
! All you have to do is click the “Stumble” button and it will take you to a webpage that will strike your fancy according to your chosen interests. The webpage can be anything: a blog, the homepage of a huge website, an article, an image, or even a video! Stumble again, and it will take you to another webpage, again, and again, and again. Repeat until you realize you’ve successfully killed the time at hand!
What’s more, you can choose to Stumble through all of your interests randomly or one specific interest. You can also choose one specific kind of media you want to Stumble, like images, videos, and even news. Then there is also the option to StumbleThru a website. This option is available for only a handful of websites which have vastly growing content, like Youtube and also WordPress! I personally am in love with the results it brings up for Youtube… it makes browsing Youtube such a breeze: no searching, no search results, none of that inconvenience… just interesting Youtube videos!
Apart from this, there are many additional tools. You can “thumb up” or “like” a particular stumble or even any other webpage that you want to remember and it will show up in your StumbleUpon favorites. You can also view popular Stumbled webpages which have gotten the most hits and even narrow those popular pages down to only those which fall into your selected areas of interest.
For power users, StumbleUpon also offers a complete social network, pretty much like any website does nowadays. But in StumbleUpon’s social network, you can find people of similar interests and follow them. That will allow you to browse through any articles that they have liked. It will also improve your own Stumble results based on what the people you are following have thumbed up or liked. Your own favorites will also be featured for people who are following you. So, essentially, it is a social network of people recommending each other cool webpages to go through!
Well, all that’s left to say now is that you should go to stumbleupon.com right now and sign up for an account. You won’t regret it, promise!
