StumbleUpon has created one of the fastest growing networks of individuals who rate and recommend sites. Some 2 million members rate over 9 million sites.
The company is doing well and generating a lot of interest. This week it was said to be in final talks to be acquired this week by eBay for $45 million. Company co-founder Garrett Camp refuted the reports.
The company has done a very impressive job in organizing video clips, primarily from YouTube, into categories and favorites. These favorite lists are shared among members of the StumbleUpon community. This video service was introduced in December.
StumbleUpon provides a thin downloaded toolbar that allows members to rate and organize favorites. I think it’s a very cool interface.
I visited co-founder and CEO Garrett Camp in San Francisco in December and published this interview on Beet.TV
Today (Friday) the company greatly expands its offering with something called StumbleThru. Instead of applying the collective social network to the millions of sites, it’s putting its group power to rate and categorize just seven sites: Flickr, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, BBC, CNN and Physorg.
For video search , social ratings are essential since conventional crawling and indexing don’t apply to video. YouTube has done a good job in organizing videos around ratings and recommendations and is rapidly improving the social functionality.
It going to be very interesting to see the power of this big, "stumbling" network going to work on rating and organizing CNN and the BBC.
For an interesting take on this, checkout TechCrunch.
— Andy Plesser
StumbleUpon
Garrett Camp
StumbleThru
Online Video
