One of the most talked about features of Web 2.0 are what might be called recommendation engines, or social networks that focus on finding and promoting content of some kind, usually links to interesting websites.
One of the best known of these social bookmarking services is Digg.com, which allows registered users to post links (along with a brief description), then allows other users to vote those links up or down.
This ranking system drives certain links to the front page of the Digg site, which then exposes them to tens of thousands of web surfers, and as a result can drive substantial amounts of traffic to anyone whose site gets "dugg." Some websites have had servers go offline or watched their bandwidth bill soar as a result of the "flash crowds" that Digg can produce.
But Digg is not the only such service. Other similar social-bookmarking tools include Reddit (recently acquired by publishing giant Conde Nast), and Shoutwire. And there is a Canadian player -- or at least one that used to be based in Canada, and is now headquartered in Silicon Valley. It's called StumbleUpon, and while it doesn't get as much attention as Digg, there are signs that it has also become a substantial driver of traffic to websites that get "stumbled."
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StumbleUpon consists of a browser toolbar for either Firefox or Internet Explorer, with a button that says "stumble," a menu with a series of categories, and two other buttons with a thumbs-up icon and a thumbs-down icon on them.
Hitting the "stumble" button takes a browser to a random website -- either one chosen from all of the sites StumbleUpon indexes, or one chosen from within a specific category. Once there, users can vote in favour of the site or against it.
Garrett Camp and a couple of friends -- Geoff Smith and Justin LaFrance -- started StumbleUpon in Calgary in 2002, while Garrett was in graduate school. The idea was to develop a somewhat random way of discovering new websites, one that would recreate the "television-surfing metaphor" as Garrett describes it. "Not to replace search or anything like that," he says, "but just as a way of discovering things that you didn't know you wanted to see -- a web discovery tool."
One of the interesting things about StumbleUpon's development is that the service initially started with the Windows '98 version of Internet Explorer, and then released a Firefox toolbar, and relatively quickly reached more than one million Firefox users. But it didn't have an Internet Explorer toolbar until last year. The service now has almost two million users (who have installed the toolbar), and last year the company accepted a reported $1.5-million in financing from a group including early investors in Google, and Garrett and Geoff moved to San Francisco.
"It was a chance meeting," says Garrett. "I was a conference in September and a guy took me for dinner, he used it, and then I talked with him online and on the phone and he introduced us to people, and we met the guy who eventually became our chairman."
Having finished his thesis -- although he says it took him twice as long as it should have -- Garrett says he was ready to move anyway, and both he and Geoff liked San Francisco. The company has been cash-flow positive almost since it started, thanks to advertising and user contributions.
StumbleUpon now has more than six million websites that have been voted upon by users, and has added features including the ability to "stumble" upon pictures and to stumble based on keywords. The latest addition was the ability to stumble upon videos, a la YouTube.
The service now gets more than 3.5 million "stumbles" a day, and has rolled out its own advertising network with targeted ads that Garrett says are aimed at different demographic groups and categories of surfer.
