For about the last year I have been an active user of StumbleUpon. I quickly started using the site after it sent a rush of traffic to my primary blog shortly after it was launched. After using the site for a while and becoming a big fan of the service, there are a few things that I would like to see added or changed that I believe would improve the experience for users. Although I am an active user, I don’t spend hours on the site every day. Some of these things may be possible now and I’m just not aware of it. If that’s the case, please leave a comment. Also, feel free to leave your own wish lists in the comments.
1. See All Users Who Give a Thumbs Up, Not Just 50.
While I am surfing on other sites I frequently take a moment to check and see who has given a thumbs up to the page that I’m on at the moment. Part of this is just curiosity and part of it is to find new Stumblers that have similar interests as me. Pages that get more than 50 thumbs up don’t show everyone. Obviously SU has a reason for doing this, but I would like to be able to see more, so it’s going on my wish list. If seeing all of the users isn’t going to happen I would settle for just being able to see the total number of users that have given a thumbs up.
2. See All Users Who Give a Thumbs Down, Not Just Those Who Leave a Review.
When a user gives a thumbs down without leaving a review it is not visible from the reviews page. I would like to see this list of users to be displayed just like the list of users who give a thumbs up. Of course, when I’m looking at one of my own pages this could be more discouraging than anything, but I think it would help to get a better idea of what people like and what they don’t.
3. Show Avatars for All Friends When Using the Share Feature.
When using the toolbar to send a link to one of your friends you’ll see an avatar for the friends that you most commonly send links to, but when you go to “all friends” you just see names. While I’m sure it would take a bit more space to show everyone’s avatar, I think it would improve the share feature. Sometimes I have a link that I would like to show with a friend, but I can’t remember their SU username. The avatars are obviously helpful for finding the right user.
4. Be Able to Share a Link with More than 1 Friend at a Time.
One of the complaints I’ve heard from time-to-time is the lack of ability to share a link with multiple users at one time. Currently, in order to share a link with five friends you have to do so one at a time. I have mixed feelings about this. I like the fact that it discourages spam by forcing users to manually share with everyone one-by-one, but at the same time I think it holds back the feature of sharing links. Personally, I’d like to see an option for sharing with at least a few friends at once, if not more. While I have a pretty good number of friends, I rarely receive more than 2 or 3 shared links per day. I wouldn’t mind changes that increased that number.
5. Show How Many Links Friends Have Shared with You When Using the Share Feature.
When you go to share a link with a friend you can see how many links you have sent to that particular friend in the past. This is really handy for making sure that you’re not sending too much to the same people, but I think it would be equally helpful to see how many links others have shared with me. If I could see that a particular user has shared a lot more links with me than I have shared with them, I would be more likely to send something. Likewise, if I saw that a particular user never shares anything with me I would make sure that I didn’t send them too many links.
6. Improved Widget that Shows the Number of Reviews or Thumbs Up.
The SU toolbar is really what makes StumbleUpon so unique. There are so many things you can do quickly and easily with the toolbar. However, one area that I think SU could use some improvement is with the widgets and buttons that they offer. Maybe one of the reasons that they don’t offer more choices is that most of the users just Stumble with the toolbar, so buttons and widgets aren’t as necessary as they are with other social media sites. Still, I would like to see a button that could be put on any page to show visitors how many reviews or thumbs up the page has received. On my primary blog I have had good success using a tool from Delicious that shows how many bookmarks a page has received. When visitors see a high number there it encourages them to also bookmark the page, and I think a StumbleUpon widget would have a similar effect. Basically, visitors on you page would see that 10 users have given a thumbs up, and maybe it would prompt them to do the same.
7. RSS Feeds for Popular Items According to Tags.
I’m pretty surprised this isn’t currently available, so maybe it is and I just don’t know where to find it. On the buzz pages you can see items that are currently popular for a specific tag (for example, see the design buzz page). I would like to be able to subscribe by RSS to get the links that appear on this page.
8. More Space for Typing an Email.
From time-to-time I’ll send an email through my SU page to another user. This functionality is pretty useful in my opinion, but the amount of screen space that you have to type the email is tiny. Why not give more space to see what you’re typing?
What are your thoughts?
What’s on your wish list? Again, if you are aware of a way to accomplish anything on my wish list, please let me know in the comments.
Originally Published April 7th, 2008
28 comments from readers
1 Tom Beaton Apr 7, 2008 at 4:28 pm
I do enjoy the traffic from stumbleupon, and sharing links is a really nice feature too. I always find it hard to simply move around the SU website itself. It does not seem all that intuitive. Without the toolbar it would be useless.
2 Jason Falls Apr 7, 2008 at 4:33 pm
I’ve forever and a day wished for more than 200 friends. I have lots of people that have “Friended” me but I can’t reciprocate because SU puts a limit on it. Kinda crappy that they think they need to limit my friends. I should be the judge of that.
Great list, by the way. I echo them all.
3 Steven Snell Apr 7, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Tom,
I agree. There is so much going on that it’s hard to figure out some of the things you can do with StumbleUpon. When you’re new it’s really confusing.
Jason,
The 200 friends limit doesn’t really bother me personally, but it would be nice to not be limited.
4 Vinh Le Apr 7, 2008 at 7:46 pm
In regards to #6, I saw skellie has been able to do this at http://www.skelliewag.org
I have been trying to figure it out myself, but no luck. I imagine it is some script that goes to the stumble page and grabs the number of reviews off of the page? I wish to learn how to do this myself. If you find out, send me a link. Same for the diggs, that is cool.
5 Wayne Liew Apr 7, 2008 at 10:51 pm
I guess regarding the visibility of SU users giving a Thumbs Down sign will only give more messages (sometimes hate messages) for them to reply.
I have tried giving a down sign with a review and the webmaster will normally write to me, demanding for the reason. Well, I will try my best to reply since I believe it can help improve the site or contents in some way but it is really a pain for productivity.
6 Ari Apr 7, 2008 at 10:52 pm
I just wish they’d release for Safari.
7 Alina Popescu Apr 8, 2008 at 12:25 am
I joined SU quite a long time ago. But I’ve only started to be an active user a few months ago. I love it, but I agree the link sharing system could be improved and that emails need a bigger character limit.
Also, adding RSS feeds would be amazing! There is so much content and it’s hard to keep up with it at times.
8 loupis Apr 8, 2008 at 1:09 am
I don’t think being limited to 200 friends is a terrible idea, but I’d like to have 200 friends for different categories. In the majority of my stumble groups, very few stumblers actually participate. Being able to have 200 friends for each topic would be great.
9 Rich Apr 8, 2008 at 2:13 am
I would like the ability to view the ‘pages i have liked’ in a more structured way. I now have pages and pages of favourites but finding them again afterwards can be time consuming.
Perhaps having the favourites also organised in the same way as the channels (arts/history, commerce, home/living etc) might be better. This should run along side the existing way, as if they were only ‘organised’ it would be too cumbersome.
10 Nick Apr 8, 2008 at 4:52 am
StumbleUpon would be amazing with some of the features mentioned in the post and the comments. What I would like to see most is, as mentioned in the post, that all the thumbs up were shown and not just 50.
11 Daw Hosting Blog Apr 8, 2008 at 5:26 am
I remember that I was confused about how to use Stumbleupon in the beginning and if I want to be honest I can say I still can not use the best of this Social website. Thank you for the article. It made some things more clear
But I worry about something else, something that makes me to stay away from social websites. they are becoming a heaven fro spammers and hell for their members.
12 Matthew Griffin Apr 8, 2008 at 8:08 am
I hope the guys at Stumbleupon stumble upon this list.
13 Steven Snell Apr 8, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Vinh,
It looks like Skellie is using FeedBurner’s FeedFlare script. That is actually pretty simple, FeedBurner will provide the script for that. I kind of forgot about that option. Personally, I’d like to see something official from SU with their logo or a thumbs up or something.
Rich,
Agreed.
14 nitos Apr 8, 2008 at 8:19 pm
although SU has a group of what do you like or want in SU.. you can do it via post!
I would like the RSS for every tag
15 Tina2 Apr 9, 2008 at 8:31 am
Wow I have the same wish list.
Thank you for this blog I do hope the guys from StumbleUpon see this
16 Bruce from Brucisms.com Apr 9, 2008 at 8:57 am
Couldn’t agree more with all the above!
I’ve also heard that SU “penalizes” or doesn’t give as much weight to stumbles from friends - which doesn’t make much sense. Isn’t the point to share with your friends?
17 Tad Chef Apr 9, 2008 at 1:44 pm
StumbleUpon is afraid of giving the people too much power and allowing transparency. Mixx is a place where you can send messages to all your friends, see who votes you down etc. and it works fine.
18 Steven Snell Apr 9, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Bruce,
I’m not sure if they penalize thumbs up from friends, but if a user consistently gives a thumbs up to pages on the same URL they will have less and less weight with time.
Tad,
Yeah, I’ll like a lot of the features at Mixx.
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21 No / Low Calorie Drinks Apr 14, 2008 at 10:03 am
I don’t think publishers should take the thumbs down so seriously; it’s there for the user to say ‘don’t show me similar pages anymore.’
That doesn’t mean anything is actually wrong with the site or the content. Example; I have Christianity listed as an interest, so when a site promoting atheism sticks the ‘Christianity’ tag in there to get more traffic, I’m going to thumb them down, because I’m not interested, and do not want to stumble upon anymore atheist websites. My thumbing would have no bearing whatsoever on the quality of the page, or copy. I just don’t want to see anything else on that subject.
If we, as site operators, want to get consistent thumbs up, we need to be very picky with how we tag our submissions.
22 Top Stumbles - Best of StumbleUpon Apr 17, 2008 at 5:21 pm
My StumbleUpon Wish List | Traffikd…
For about the last year I have been an active user of StumbleUpon. I quickly started using the site after it sent a rush of traffic to my primary blog…
23 Geoserv Apr 17, 2008 at 5:48 pm
StumbleUpon is my favourite social networking site.
How do you see who thumbed up a particular website?
VOTED for you at:
http://www.newsdots.com/tutorials/my-stumbleupon-wish-list-traffikd/
24 Steven Snell Apr 19, 2008 at 5:54 am
Geoserv,
If you have the SU toolbar installed you can click on the icon that looks like a little speech bubble. It’s right next to the “send to” button. That will show you the reviews of the page and who has given a thumbs up (up to 50 users).
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27 Rhonda May 10, 2008 at 10:24 pm
I am a fan of StumbleUpon. It certainly drives sustained traffic to your site. I joined StumbleUpon 3 months ago, my profile is:
http://inspirationforch.stumbleupon.com
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