As a former web-developer, one of the things I do is try to figure out how neat web apps work. Now, before I get rolling, I have to say that EXACTLY how StumbleUpon works is a trade secret and they certainly aren’t going to reveal that info to me. Also, a comprehensive overview of how it might work would make for an article that is far longer than this format allows for. What follows is a simplified theory on how it works based on my years of web developing and some probing around the application.

The heart of any large web application is the database. If you aren’t familiar with what a database is, the best everyday example I can give is the phone book. A phone book is just a lot of data records that are organized by region, business or residential, town, and then alphabetically by last name. Because the structure of the phone book has become common knowledge, we can easily find that data that we want. That common knowledge of looking up the region, then deciding if the number we want is residential or a business, then looking up the town and then quickly going to the alphabetical section where we know that John Q. Public’s number will be – under the P. That process might be referred to as an algorithm for finding a phone number.

I expect that StumbleUpon has a very large database!

When you sign up for StumbleUpon, they ask you to define a few categories of interest to you. This helps them to direct you to web pages that have been put in those categories.

When you press the button, a message is sent to the StumbleUpon database that most likely is just your User ID. The database looks up the categories that you chose when you signed up. From there, the application most likely chooses one of those categories randomly. Then the application goes through that category and finds a webpage in that category that is new to you, and directs your browser to that page.

Now it gets a bit more complicated as certain questions are raised. The first one that comes up for me is, how do they know the website is new to me? Well, I imagine that the websites that you have visited through StumbleUpon are tracked. I say this because I have gotten to the point in some StumbleUpon categories where StumbleUpon tells me that there is no more for me to see in this category. (Yes, I stumble a lot.)

Now I wonder how it knows what type of web pages in a certain category I will like. That’s what the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons are for.

If I give a page a thumbs-up, it probably adds a point to not only that page, but to the keywords associated with that page, so other pages with a high correlation to that pages keywords will be weighted heavier in favour of showing up under my User ID.

If that’s the case for the thumbs-up, then the thumbs-down has to function in a similar manner. Hit the thumbs-down button and and the application, in effect, takes away a point for that page and pages with similar keywords.  The thumbs-down button does have a few more features to it though. If you click on the black arrow-down part of the button, you’re given a few options: Not-For-Me, Report Spam, Duplicate Content, and Block Website.

Not-For-Me is the basic function of this button. Report Spam sends a message to StumbleUpon that the page served up is not anything like what it should be and is just, well, spam! Duplicate Content helps StumbleUpon know when you get served a page more than once. That could happen if the page has been added under more than one category. Block Website will block the entire website that the page was served from. This is what I use when I come across a page that is in another language or just completely not for me.

Here’s a little chart to give you a visual representation of the simplified process, as I believe it happens.

That’s the simple underpinnings of StumbleUpon. As you move to the right of the StumbleUpon toolbar, there are different options you can use to refine your Stumbling and add to the quality of the rankings of pages.

Do you use StumbleUpon? What’s your favourite site that you have stumbled upon? Let us know your StumbleUpon stories in the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Two Random Alternatives to Stumbleupon (9)
• Technology Explained: What Is CGI Animation? (13)
• Technology Explained: What Is Bluetooth? (8)
• Technology Explained: What Is Blackberry Technology? (15)
• Technology Explained: What Are Computer Chips Made Out Of? (10)

Su.pr is currently in private Beta mode. If you like to test drive the service, you must first have a StumbleUpon account, then follow the official SU twitter account and wait for them to release the beta code. I was lucky to receive the beta code the moment I followed SU, but I have seen others waited 5 days for the code. Your waiting time could vary. Once you obtained the beta code, simply enter into the input field at the Su.pr homepage.

At the homepage, you can see a textbox where you can enter your text message and link. Just like Twitter, you are only allowed 140 characters and all links within the text will be shorten with the Su.pr prefix.

From here, you have several options. You can either:

• Post your text message to Twitter or Facebook (or both)
• Schedule it to post at a later date (like Tweetlater)
• Just use the URL shortener service to translate your long URL

Is that all about Su.pr?

You bet! That is only the tip of the iceberg. Every post message or link that you submit (or create) via Su.pr will be tracked and recorded. You can view real time analytic result of your posted items and see how popular it gets. Statistics that you can view include the number of retweets, number of StumbleUpon reviews, number of click through and even traffic source. You can view stats for the past 12 hours, past 7 days, or even past 30 days.

More surprises

Suggested posting time

Based on your submission on Su.pr and the statistics, Su.pr will analyze your data and suggest the best time to post your stuff. This should help you to gain more exposure for your submissions.

Promoting your website

If you are looking to gain more traffic for your site, here is a good way to promote your site. By submitting your websites (you can enter up to 3 websites) in the Promote Website field in the Settings page, Su.pr will analyze your site(s) for the most popular content and promote them via StumbleUpon.

Su.pr bookmarklet

Su.pr is not yet integrated in the StumbleUpon toolbar. Users who wish to have quick access to Su.pr services can drag the bookmarklets (located at the bottom of Su.pr homepage) onto your bookmark bar.

Launching of API key

StumbeUpon has released the API for developers, so we should be able to see more third party apps that integrate with Su.pr in the near future.

How does StumbleUpon play a part?

Until now, it seems that everything is about Su.pr and there is no mention of StumbleUpon playing a part in the process. So how does SU play a part in Su.pr?

This is where SU comes in. When your readers/visitors/followers click on your link to reach the destination page, a StumbleUpon toolbar will show up on top of the page. If the page is not yet submitted to SU, a Discover button will be available for the user to submit to SU, else a thumb up/down button will show. This is very similar to the Digg bar, except that it is more user-friendly and maintains the usual high standard of the SU toolbar.

What Su.pr is lacking at the moment?

There are several functions that are clearly missing in Su.pr right now. The inability to post tweet to multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, inability to edit scheduled post (except for deletion), inability to post to Facebook page/group, not integrating Su.pr into StumbleUpon toolbar are some of the features that are missing and are highly requested by the community.

Noting that this is still a beta version, I am confident that the StumbleUpon team will get all this ironed out in the final release.

Meanwhile, if you have not tried Su.pr, do follow Stumbleupon (on Twitter) and grab the invitation code now.

So what do you think? Thumbs up or down? Let us know in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Track Your Short URL Links With tr.im (10)
• Create Short URL’s and Track Clicks On Your Site with Shorty (20)
• Analyze Your Website Visitor Data In Real Time With Woopra (8)
• 7 Reasons Diigo Tastes Better Than Delicious (73)
• 6 Websites to Track A Website’s Traffic (41)

By integrating social websites within Google search results, we thus achieve two aims: we combine Google search which we love most of the times with social media users’ recommendations who rate each page. If we also combine data from several social media sources, we are most likely to find the best result quickly and efficiently.

Browser Bookmarks (XMarks)

Xmarks FireFox addon (formerly knows as FoxMarks): I’ve been using it for a while as that’s a cool way to synchronize your bookmarks among a few computers and also access them from anywhere in the world online. It has introduced quite a few cool features recently – and one of them is Google search results page enhancer. It places a little blue icon next to the result which was bookmarked most of the times.

If you click on the icon, you’ll be invited to find more info on the result which includes the page ratings, reviews and similar sites:

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon toolbar inserts StumbleUpon users’ ratings within Google SERPs results. Besides, it shows:

• the name of your friend who recently stumbled it (meaning that this information is provided by the most reliable source, i.e. your friends);
• the category it was discovered at.

Delicious and Digg

SEOquake is a feature-rich FireFox addon that can be configured to show how many times each page was saved at Delicious.com and how many times the domain was dugg on Digg:

Any other ways to see people’s recommendations within Google search results? Please share them!

Post image from netsimage.com

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Get Incredible Web & Image Suggestions With inSuggest (4)
• 17 Greasemonkey Scripts to Diversify Social Media Experience (7)
• Make Your Own FireFox Search Plugins & Other Tips (8)
• How to Expand Google’s Universal Search (20)
• Delicious Toolbox : Organize Your Web with Delicious (22)

How you go about this may vary. You’ll probably go to the most rock solid of options, such as Digg, RSS, Stumbleupon, or Google, but how about doing it with a completely different recommendation or suggestion engine?

inSuggest is a simple, beautiful and virtually unknown suggestion engine that can analyze manually entered websites, images or your personal Delicious bookmarks, to give you a decent plethora of website and image recommendations.

Web inSuggest

There are three different suggestion engines built into inSuggest. The first of these quick and simple engines is the website engine. After adding each of your favorite websites (up to six), the engine displays eight different websites based on your suggestions. Along with the suggestion engine, you also have the ability to quick-search websites via keyword or just browse several random sites as well.

Images inSuggest

Images inSuggest combs the web and various image sites for any pictures that relate to your personally selected choices. Although the Images section works very well, it’s limited to only images on the website. You can’t upload your own.

You do have the additional capability of searching by keyword or searching for random images, but this section definitely needs to offer the ability to upload your own images, or at least enter an image link.

Bookmark inSuggest

The bookmarks section of inSuggest is far and away the best part of the website. It only requires your Delicious username. Once you have entered your username, your bookmarks are analyzed and results are displayed on the next page.

Also on the results page is a list of a few of your most popular and few random tags throughout your various bookmarks. So by selecting a tag, you can get another completely random list of suggested sites. The username entry page additionally includes the ability to search a random user’s Delicious account as well.

After trying out inSuggest, I found that the results did a pretty good job on sites that I don’t normally visit, or haven’t even visited at all. It looks to me they are slowly working through development, because there are definitely areas it needs to expand, and I hope they do so.

Here are some suggestions on what I think they still need.

• In the website section, they need to display a longer list of results. It would be nice if the random websites tab gave you random sites, based upon your suggestions.
• The images area definitely needs to allow the ability to upload your own images. They already give you a pretty good selection of similar items, but it would be nice to have your choices. Likely the problem they have with this, is that the images are based upon tags or keywords, so this may not be possible.
• The bookmarks section really gets it a lot more right then the rest. You get a huge selection of sites to choose from and usually are pretty accurate. The one problem I see with the product is that they are typically always the exact same sites in the exact same order. If possible, it would be nice have this completely random as well.

I hope the designers continue to develop on the site, because I believe they have a solid foundation for what could be a very popular web suggestion engine.

Please try it out and throw some suggestions at the developers in the comments, because I’m sure you have some.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• 3 Ways to See Most Favorited Google Search Result (6)
• 17 Greasemonkey Scripts to Diversify Social Media Experience (7)
• Stumbleupon Tools To Stumble Around The Web (14)
• Scuttle – Create Your Own Del.icio.us Site (5)
• Is Socialbrowse The New Stumbleupon? (7)

Below I am listing 17 Greasemonkey scripts to diversify your social media experience (for Digg, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious).

Greasemonkey is a Firefox addon, which allows to edit the way web looks and works with the help of wide variety of already available scripts. To use the scripts you find here, install the Greasemonkey extension first.

Digg

(Use Digg scripts with caution as some of them can get you banned from the site)

• Digg Larger Images on Mouseover – enlarges images on Digg home page (including the users’ avatars) when hovered over;
• Digg AdBlocker (as the name suggests) removes adverts from Digg (or this one moves the ad spot down the page);
• DiggRatingExtender shows extended Digg submission and comment history: up and down diggs as well as the total rating. This might be really interesting to see how many people like / disliked the comment:

• Digg User Topics Cloud adds a tag cloud to each user’s profile based on his recent submissions (useful for evaluating if the person is worth a follow):

Twitter

• Twitter Friends Bio at a Glance – shows bio text, following count and a web link for all friends and followers on the Twitter friends list.

• Retweet This – adds a retweet button to the end of each twitter entry. The button opens in a new tab with the full retweeted message (including @member);
• Twitter friend name helper: suggests the friend name after you type @

StumbleUpon

• Stumbleupon Avatar Bubbles – adds some fun to StumbleUpon by allowing you to see larger versions of your friends’ avatars when hovering over;

• Preview StumbleUpon Posts – enables Preview functionality in StumbleUpon forums and contact pages and also warns you if you try to navigate away from a post without submitting it.
• SU Visual Editor Plus enhances the built-in SU editor by matching the background color, adjusting the its width and displaying images correctly;
• SU2Bookmarks (found under “You can also” section in the sidebar) scans your favorites and generates a bookmarks.html file. You may import this file into any web browser as a list of bookmarks. Favorites will be sorted in folders by their SU topic.

Reddit

• Reddit Zebra-izer adds color to Reddit rows for better usability:

• Reddit – Undeletion: recovers deleted comments and users on reddit.
• Reddit Filter Plus filters or highlights submissions by user, domain or keyword. Tired of some submission topics?  Or of some specific user’s submissions?  Or of some domain? Now you can filter those out! Alternatively, you can use any color to highlight submissions by any user, using any keywords or belonging to any domain. The script is easily managed right from your Reddit “Preferences” page.

Delicious.com

• Sort Visible Links (as you might have guessed) sorts your bookmarks by title, URL or popularity.
• Show Delicious Images: looks at each delicious image link and shows the image on the page.
• Fav.icio.us3 adds a favicon to each Delicious listing:

What Greasemonkey scripts do you use for your social media sites? Tell us the links to them in the comments so everyone can benefit!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Get Incredible Web & Image Suggestions With inSuggest (4)
• Delicious Toolbox : Organize Your Web with Delicious (22)
• 3 Ways to See Most Favorited Google Search Result (6)
• Stumbleupon Tools To Stumble Around The Web (14)
• Dump Delicious And Dig(g) Deeper With Twine (1)

SpinSnap

SpinSnap terms itself as a Discovery Engine. That may sound like a scientific term to you, but it is in fact a website for you to discover new interesting sites. There is no toolbar to download or any software to install. You just need to go to the site and click on the Spin button (or any of your favorite tags) to start discovering new sites. If you are not happy with the result, simply click on the Spin Again to go to the next site.

When you discover a site that you love, you can use the icon on the toolbar to rate the site, send the site to your friends, submit to Digg, Delicious or even to leave your comment.

Yoono

Yoono is a social media tool built as an extension to the Firefox browser. Once installed, it works on your sidebar and allows you to stay connected with friends on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and FriendFeed.

Within Yoono, there are several widgets that you can add to customize your page. One of these widgets is the Discovery widget that recommends sites related to the site you are browsing. For example, when you are reading this article at Make Use Of, the Discovery widget will search for relevant technology sites and display them in your sidebar.

The discovery widget is also closely linked to your Firefox bookmarks. When you click on the surprise button to get it to load a random page, Yoono will first scan your bookmarks and then display results that are related to your bookmarks. In this way, you will be sure that the random site is somehow related to your interests.

Youlicit

If you go to the main page of Youlicit, you will only see a great list of websites sorted according to their respective tags. To get the best out of Youlicit, you really need to install the Youlicit Firefox extension which is the StumbleUpon toolbar equivalent.

After you have installed the Firefox extension, you can then add the three Youlicit buttons to your toolbar. The Youlicit More! button will fetch a list of websites related to the site that you are browsing and display them in an ordered list. The Youlicit Next! button is equivalent to the Stumble! button and will show the next site that is most related to the site you are browsing. The third button is the Youlicit Recommend! which allows you to recommend a site (just like thumbing up in StumbleUpon). However, this feature is still in the testing stage and is only available to users on an invite.

Fichey

Fichey has an unique interface. It is a full flash site that allows you to “flip” the Web just like flipping a magazine.

Unlike StumbleUpon, Fichey fetches sites from the popular Web services such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon and displays them as a jpeg image. The left/right controls allows you to move to the next site and back to the previous site. You can also configure it to show sites for a specified day only.

If you have a broadband internet connection and some time to spare, Fichey can be an interesting place to spend your time.

You might also want to check out Mark’s article – Two Random Alternatives To Stumbleupon – for two other possibilities.

Do you know of any others?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Stumbleupon Tools To Stumble Around The Web (14)
• Is Socialbrowse The New Stumbleupon? (7)
• Get Incredible Web & Image Suggestions With inSuggest (4)
• What Movie Should I Watch Next? (29)
• Vista Switcher – Replace Windows’ Alt-Tab With Something Cooler (9)

1. Create and Backup Multiple profiles

When you type in the omnibox, Google Chrome is capable of digging up your history and show a list of suggestions that is closest to your search. Now, if you are those who like to frequent ‘naughty’ sites, what would happen if someone (hopefully not your wife) types in a search term and all your ‘mischief’ acts are instantly displayed in a well-organized list? I am sure that is the last thing that you want to happen.

Rather than switching to incognito mode all the time, an easy way out is to create multiple profiles for everyone that uses the browser. In such cases, you can keep all your stuff (and maybe privacy) personal and avoid those embarrassing moments.

Google Chrome Backup is a small application that allows you to easily create multiple profiles with a few mouse clicks.

Creating a new profile is as easy as clicking on the ‘New Profile’ button, enter the profile name and specify the location to save the new profile.

To backup your profile, simply right-click on the profile and select “Backup Profile”. In the event that your system crashes, you can also restore it back to your original setting.

2. Install Greasemonkey

Firefox users will know how useful Greasemonkey is. The good thing is, with a simple tweak, you can also get Greasemonkey to work in Google Chrome.

In your Google Chrome, press Ctrl + B to show your bookmark bar (if it’s hidden). Drag this Monkey bookmarklet to the bookmark bar.

Now, go to Userscripts.org and select the scripts that you want to install. On the installation page (the page with the button “Install the script”), click on the Monkey bookmarklet. This will convert the script to Chrome compatible script. Now drag the “Install the script” button to your Chrome bookmark bar. That’s it! (This trick will only on certain scripts. Scripts that contain specific functions like pre-fill comments, reload page etc will not work.)

Another way to get Greasemonkey to work in Chrome is to install Greasemetal, a userscript runtime for Chrome. To get the Greasemonkey scripts to work, you will need to download and save the scripts to the “userjs” folder in “My Documents” and run Chrome with Greasemetal.

Somehow, I find that the Monkey bookmarklet method is more user-friendly than the Greasemetal way. You can try out both and let me know which one you prefer.

3. Increase the Number of Omnibox Suggestions

By default, Chrome shows 5 URL suggestions when you type in the omnibox. If you want it to show more/less suggestions, you can change it via the “omnibox-popup-count=” command line switch.

In Windows, right click on the Chrome shortcut icon and select Properties. In the Target field, add the command line switch “-omnibox-popup-count=10″ (without the quote) to the end of the command. Change the number to your preferred number of suggestions that you want Chrome to show.

4. Change the Theme

So you wanted to dress up your Chrome but can’t find the button to change the theme? Google Chrome does not allow you to change the theme by default, but a simple tweak should get this done easily.

Download a Chrome theme of your liking.

Extract the “default.dll” file.

Navigate to your Chrome installation directory (for Vista: C:\Users\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data, for XP: C:\Documents and Settings\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data and go to /Application/Chrome version/Themes folder. The “Chrome version” folder will be in the form of 0.2.149.29 (The number will vary according to the version of Chrome that you installed). Replace the “default.dll” file in the folder with the “default.dll” file that you have just downloaded.

Restart your Chrome. You should see it dressed up in the new theme now.

(If you find the above steps too complicated, or you need an application to manage your themes, you can download the application XChrome and change the theme from a nicely designed GUI.)

5. Stumbleupon without the Toolbar

In Firefox, I used Stumbleupon to get new article ideas and to keep myself informed of interesting stuff. With this simple tweak, you can get Stumbleupon to work in Chrome as well.

Right click on the bookmark bar and select “Add page”.

Name the new bookmark Stumble! and place the following code in the URL field: javascript:window.location.href = 'http://www.stumbleupon.com/demo/#url';

Now, everytime you want to stumble a site, just click the Stumble! bookmarklet and the Stumbleupon toolbar will appear.

To submit a review to Stumbleupon, create another bookmark and name it “Review for Stumble“. In the URL field, copy and paste the following code: javascript:window.location.href = 'http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=' + document.location;

Whenever you come across a page and wanted to submit a review to Stumbleupon, simply click on the “Review for Stumble” bookmark and it will bring you to the SU review page.

6. Preview RSS feed in Google Chrome

One feature sorely missed by many in Google Chrome is the ability to preview and subscribe to a RSS feed. To tackle this issue, RAMisp.org has written a script that allows you to preview and subscribe to a site’s RSS feed in Google Chrome.

• In your Chrome, go to http://feeds.ramisp.org
• Drag the “Auto-Detect RSS” link to your bookmark bar.

Now, whenever you want to preview a site RSS feed, simply click on the “Auto detect RSS” bookmark and you will see the preview of the feed on the RAMisp site. You can also subscribe to the feed via Google, Yahoo, or Netibes.

7. Customize your Own Shortcut Keys

Google Chrome comes with a set of useful shortcut keys, but if you want more of it, you can make use of Autohotkey to create your own shortcut keys.

Download Autohotkey from http://www.autohotkey.com/download/

Install it in your Windows.

Check out HowTo Tuts for some ready-made shortcut key scripts for Chrome.

Save the “.ahk” scripts to your system. Double click the “.ahk” scripts to activate the shortcut keys.

Open your Chrome, you should now be able to use your custom shortcut keys in the Chrome.

Some of the ready-made shortcut key scripts found in “HowTo Tuts” include:

• Win+a or F1 Switch to previous tab
• Win+s or F2 Switch to next tab
• Win+z Go back
• Win+x Go forward
• Win+c or F4 Close current tab
• Win+v Paste and go
• Win+Alt+v Paste and go in a new tab
• ctrl+z or F12 Undo last tab
• CAPS Switch to Chrome and create a new tab (If Chrome isn’t already running, it opens Chrome first)
• Scroll mouse wheel on the tab bar switches to previous and next tabs
• Ctrl+Shift+T to post to Twitter (automatically tinyurls the current page)
• Ctrl+Shift+D or Ctrl+Shift+B to bookmark to Delicious

Which one is your favorite hack? Do you know of any other Google Chrome hacks? Let us know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• 10 Cool Extensions for Google Chrome (57)
• Stumbleupon Tools To Stumble Around The Web (14)
• Quick Tip: Backup Firefox Preferences (18)
• How to Start Google Chrome in Incognito Mode by Default (23)
• How to Save and Monitor Bandwidth when using Firefox (11)

At the moment there aren’t many people on Socialbrowse because it is quite new so I recommend that you sign up and give it a go because it has quite a nice community.

One thing that I really like about Socialbrowse is that you don’t have to enter a username or password. The only information that you have to enter is your email address. By default your username on Socialbrowse will be ‘Anonymous’ but to change this all you have to do is simply go to your account then edit your profile.

From the ‘edit profile’ page you can enter your name and a little bit of information about you and what you’re interested in. You can also upload a picture or icon to make your profile look better and also so people can identify you on the site. Under the edit page there is also a Sharing and Preferences tab. Under the sharing tab you will see the RSS feeds for your account as well as a text field that will allow you to change your share name. Under the preferences tab you have two check boxes, the first being ‘email me when I get a fan’ and the second being ‘email messages posted on my profile’. If you don’t want to receive email notifications from Socialbrowse then you can easily disable them from here.

When you sign up to Socialbrowse you automatically get 10 invitations so you should invite your friends over so that they can join in on the fun too.

When you have installed the Firefox extension for Socialbrowse you will see three icons next to the address bar. The first icon opens up the sidebar so that you can see the latest websites that people are sharing and the latest comments that people have written.

The next icon is the comments. If you’re on a website and want to view the comments you can click this icon and view the comments as well as being able to comment on the website too so that people know what you think about it.

The third icon is the share icon. If you click this icon you will share this link in your feed and all your followers will be able to see it. If you hold down the arrow on the icon you can choose which category the link goes under or you can unshare the link if you accidentally hit this button.

The fun thing about Socialbrowse is that you get points when people share a link that you have shared. So share as many good links as you can find and have fun.

Tell us what you think about Socialbrowse in the comments and whether you like it, will use it or if you’ll give it a miss. Does SocialBrowse have the potential to give Stumbleupon a run for its money?

[rating=4]

(By) Wez is a student studying computers, also does programming and video tutorials and writes about technology, software and websites, check out his blog @ www.TheTutorialBlog.com

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Stumbleupon Tools To Stumble Around The Web (14)
• Use Hunch to Answer Your Questions & Make Decisions (4)
• Social Networking Sites that I Make Use Of (7)
• Psst…Do You Plurk? (21)
• Manage your Online Social Life with SecondBrain (12)

Google’s “Picks For you”

This one won’t be for everyone’s tastes for the following reasons. First of all, you need the Google toolbar installed. Secondly, you need to activate Google search history. You also need a Google account but anyone with a Gmail account already has one of those. So you kind of need to be a bit of a Google fan to have all of that and you also need to trust them with your search history (so anyone that values their privacy may howl with protest).

So if you have all of those things installed, click here and the “Picks For You” button will appear on your Google toolbar in the form of a pair of dice.

You can also, in theory, bypass the toolbar button and enter the following URL into the browser address bar :

http://www.google.com/searchhistory/items?op=rec_rd&cd=ifb&hl=en

and it does the same job as the dice button. But you still need your Google search history enabled. There’s no getting around that one unfortunately.

“Picks For You” is Google’s very basic version of StumbleUpon. You first need to have a fairly big search history built up. Then when you click the dice button, Picks For You takes a look at your search history, decides what kinds of sites you would like to see (based on your past searches) and then randomly takes you to a similar kind of site.

Obviously it is not as good as Stumbleupon. There’s no profiles, no close-knit community, no customization, no ability to choose subjects the way that Stumbleupon allows you to. But for a change of pace, “Picks For You” is quite nice and it will be interesting to see where Google takes this in the future.

Random Wikipedia pages

By entering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random into the browser address bar, you are then taken to a random Wikipedia page. If you have writers block, I have often found that stumbling Wikipedia helps to clear the mind. I have had some issues with Wikipedia in the past but nevertheless, it is still a site worth visiting. Click the random button once and you could be taken to a page about Queen Victoria. Click the button again and you could end up on Homer Simpson’s page.

If you decide you like the random button, you can easily make a clickable browser button. Just right-click on your browser bookmark toolbar and choose “new bookmark”. Enter the random Wikipedia URL under “location” and under “name”, just give it a name such as “Wikipedia Random”. Then next time you’re bored and Stumbleupon holds no appeal, just click on the button and off you go.

Do you know if any other websites have random buttons? If so, please let everyone know in the comments with the URL of the random button so we can try it out! I am particularly looking for a Delicious random button (if one exists). I emailed Delicious and asked them but they didn’t respond. Does anyone know if they have a random button feature?

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger and professional freelance writer. Visit his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• StumbleUpon-Discover Websites that People Like (3)
• Stumbleupon Tools To Stumble Around The Web (14)
• Put MakeUseOf on your Google toolbar (7)
• Learn Interesting Geographical Facts About Mars On Google (8)
• Google Maps Rolls Out Spanking New Features (39)

But you don’t have to be a blogger or webmaster in order to appreciate and enjoy Stumbleupon. Anyone can use the site to enrich their internet using experience. With lots of different categories, groups and tools, StumbleUpon can change the way you look at the net – even someone as jaded as me who sees countless new pages every day in this job and finds it hard to be impressed with the Next New Thing.

Here are some useful StumbleUpon tools and pages :

The Stumbleupon Community – a list of the most active users on Stumbleupon, constantly updated. If you are new to Stumbleupon, maybe linking to these users, chatting to them and seeing what they are looking at will give you an idea of what to do yourself.

Link to your Stumbled Videos – as well as webpages, you can also stumble videoclips, and this small snippet of HTML can put a link to your stumbled videos on your website / blog.

Put Stumble Buttons on your webpage – you can use these buttons to link to your Stumble profile and also advertise the fact you are a prolific stumbler!

Back up your Stumbleupon page to your hard-drive – using this script, you can now back up your Stumble blog to your own computer as a HTML file. Useful if you have thousands of pages bookmarked and one day Stumbleupon goes down!

Create an archives to your Stumbleupon pages – this script will create an archives to your stumble pages which people can click on to see what you stumbled last year or two years ago.

StumbleUpon add-ons – a page with lots of useful add-ons for Stumbleupon including Firefox extensions, bookmarklets and userscripts.

Stumble-Mod – this site will allow you to create a bookmarklet that will automatically insert your personalised layout into any StumbleUpon text box.

Opera Stumbler – an unofficial toolbar for stumbling on the Opera browser.

Greasemonkey scripts (which of course requires the Firefox browser and Greasemonkey)

Sticky Helper – places a sticky note on your stumble page.

Tag Toplist – adds a little button to each StumbleUpon profile which allows you to see some advanced statistics about the tags (sort alphabetically or by tag count).

WYSIWYG editor – this Greasemonkey script adds an WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to StumbleUpon, so you can easily format your review’s and comments.

Preview Stumbleupon posts – allows you to preview your Stumbleupon posts before submitting them.

StumbleVideo Embed Code Displayer – displays the “embed” HTML code when stumbling videos on Stumbleupon Video.

What Stumbleupon tools have I forgotten? Drop those links in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Is Socialbrowse The New Stumbleupon? (7)
• StumbleUpon-Discover Websites that People Like (3)
• 7 Useful Hacks To Improve Your Google Chrome Experience (23)
• 17 Greasemonkey Scripts to Diversify Social Media Experience (7)
• YouTube.com – Online Video Sharing Site (23)