Computer Support Blog

StumbleUpon recently made some changes.  Guided by focus groups, StumbleUpon’s CEO authorized alterations to StumbleUpon with the stated purpose of making the site easier to use.  While not entirely eliminating the fun, random nature of StumbleUpon’s interface – which took you to websites that conformed to your stated interests – CEO Garrett Camp made a number of changes to the popular site.  In addition to putting graphic representations of interests on the front page and adding a search engine to the site, StumbleUpon now features Channels.

Channels on StumbleUpon are collections of pages placed into StumbleUpon by celebrities or corporations.  Previously, both celebrities and corporations could add content to StumbleUpon. If you had interests that matched what the celebrity or corporation added to the site, you would find their content.  You could increase the odds of running into the content added by people you liked – even celebrities and companies – by adding them as friends to your StumbleUpon account.

Apparently, this was not good enough for those who wanted StumbleUpon to be something other than a glorified random website finder . . . portal . . . thing.  Those in the business officially classify StumbleUpon as a “social discovery engine”.  StumbleUpon was a good site for seeing what your friends like when you were bored or sharing websites with your friends when there was no urgency to e-mail them a direct link.  So now, there are Channels.

Instead of adding CNN, The New Yorker, or Jennifer Lopez as friends and having the pages they like randomly added to your StumbleUpon feed where the discovery engine finds your likes overlap, now you can visit their Channel.  The StumbleUpon Channels allow those you like to throw even more content at you.  Doesn’t every celebrity in the world and corporation already have a website of their own, dedicated to just that purpose?

StumbleUpon Channels are a strange redundancy marketed as “new.”  Take, for example, the Epicurious Channel.  The Epicurious Channel has almost twelve hundred followers and the content is almost exclusively Facebook and Epicurious.com pages.  The Epicurious Channel is dominated by links to the Epicurious Facebook page (mostly their photos) and Epicurious.com.  This begs the question, who are these twelve hundred people who do not already frequent the Epicurious Facebook page or Epicurious.com?  And if they aren’t Epicurious’s “friend” on Facebook already, why do they care what the current Epicurious Facebook photo is?!

The answer is that there is no practical reason for the Channels.  StumbleUpon is not about unique content; it is a portal to other sites with the content.  What Camp fails to consider is that the vast majority of people who would like the Channels on StumbleUpon are much more likely to stop using StumbleUpon when they see the content.  After all, how many times are people likely to go to a site that directs them to their favorite celebrity’s Facebook page before they just cut out the middle man and go directly to the page the celebrity is always pointing to?

StumbleUpon Channels might only serve to make StumbleUpon obsolete faster.

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