by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media
Social Media is an ever-changing landscape, with new tools and updates coming out almost daily. With the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, other platforms are expanding their offerings to keep up. Over the next three weeks we will look at three of those platforms.
The site underwent changes in late 2009 to bring it closer to Twitter and Facebook. They started asking their members to share and link the site's recommendations with their networks - effectively becoming another social network. To date, StumbleUpon has over 10,420,000 members and growing. StumbleUpon uses
/ 
ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that friends and like-minded stumblers (
) have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn't find using a search engine.
Now the community of StumbleUpon users might be more influential in what you see and hear, For the web professional who relies on StumbleUpon as a source of website traffic, these changes will mean more time must be spent on real networking. Instead of being able to just submit content for discovery by others, you have to work at it more, including submission, recommendations and networking with peers inside the network.
Next week we will look at Ping.fm.
Social Media is an ever-changing landscape, with new tools and updates coming out almost daily. With the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, other platforms are expanding their offerings to keep up. Over the next three weeks we will look at three of those platforms.
The Resurgence of StumbleUpon
A very interesting website guide, StumbleUpon , helps users randomly discover and share websites with others who share similar interests, accessed primarily through the website at www.stumbleupon.com or through a FireFox browser add-on.The site underwent changes in late 2009 to bring it closer to Twitter and Facebook. They started asking their members to share and link the site's recommendations with their networks - effectively becoming another social network. To date, StumbleUpon has over 10,420,000 members and growing. StumbleUpon uses
/ ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that friends and like-minded stumblers () have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn't find using a search engine.Now the community of StumbleUpon users might be more influential in what you see and hear, For the web professional who relies on StumbleUpon as a source of website traffic, these changes will mean more time must be spent on real networking. Instead of being able to just submit content for discovery by others, you have to work at it more, including submission, recommendations and networking with peers inside the network.
Next week we will look at Ping.fm.
