StumbleUpon released a new change to their discovery process today that makes it super easy for anyone to add content to their system.
It is important to point out that the biggest changes are for the users that have the StumbleUpon toolbar installed. If you are discovering content through the site or with one of the StumbleUpon social media buttons, then you see basically the same screen you did before, with a minor design change.
For the toolbar users, they made some significant changes.
To start, they added a quick submit, which requires only two actions; determine if it is spam and then submit it. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
Of course the quick submit doesn’t give all the topic, tags, and review options that a typical discovery allows you, so they have a more complete discovery option, which shows as the default when clicking the ‘thumbs up’ button on the StumbleUpon toolbar.
The difference for anyone who is a regular StumbleUpon user is immediate, but the very first option is something you should be careful with.
Where the old discovery screen would have the question ‘Page contains adult content?’, it now asks ‘Safe for work?’
The habit was to always click ‘no’ before and move on, but if you do that now, then you are saying it is not safe for work, so be careful with this.
The next part allows you to select the topic, but what is cool is that you can now select to ‘be more specific’ by choosing a secondary category for your discovery. The old system only allowed you one main Topic.
The next step is to put in your tags, which StumbleUpon has also tried to make a little easier by providing you a list of tags you have used in the past for similar Topic discoveries.
If you have not discovered anything in that Topic before, then it provides you no suggestions.
Then you just enter in your review, click the ‘add review’ button, and go about your day.
The new discovery system is a lot easier and offers a few new aspects to the discovery process, so congrats to StumbleUpon for an improved feature.
I only wish they would spend a little more time solving the infamous ‘Stumble Lag‘ and other bugs that plague users too.
I like the new changed.
Looks pretty good… I should start using StumbleUpon again 😛
You really should. It has grown so fast and become one of my favorites now.
Love It ..Much Easter…
Stumble upon has proved a great driver of traffic for me (i work as team leader, SEO at Wisitech) especially when I am working on SMM projects. With these new additions, i hope, stumble will keep doing the good work for me.
i agree that stumbleupon is actually great for traffic even on longtail/niche topics