WebProNews

Tag: Explore Box

  • StumbleUpon Ditches Explore Box In Toolbar, Pushes Users To Site

    I pulled out the old trusty StumbleUpon toolbar this morning to use the Explore Box (the StumbleUpon version of search) to stumble through some topic which I’ve already forgotten, to find the Explore Box was not there. I asked a few others, and they weren’t seeing it either.

    Wondering what happened to this tool (and hoping that they were not phasing it out altogether), which I use on pretty much a daily basis (sometimes multiple times throughout the day), I shot an email over to StumbleUpon, and it turns out that they’ve decided to remove the feature from the toolbar.

    A StumbleUpon spokesperson told me, “Explore Box is still an important feature for our community so we decided to make it more readily available for users by moving it from the toolbar (Chrome and Web bar) to the home page. We also believe that removing it from the toolbar will reduce some of the complexity some users experience using the toolbar. We have no plans to eliminate the Explore Box.”

    Okay, so good news that they’re not eliminating the feature. It was not present when they launched the new app for iOS, and I asked it about it then too, when they also told me that it’s “still an important feature for the community,” and that it would be available in a future release.

    I’m not sure how moving it from the toolbar to the home page makes it more readily available to users, given that not only was it already on the homepage, but that the toolbar is available to users no matter what page they’re on, but I’m happy they’re not getting rid of it entirely.

    This seems to be a play to encourage more users to interact with StumbleUpon.com. Historically, the nature of StumbleUpon hasn’t really required much use of the domain itself on the user’s part. This is one major thing that has really separated StumbleUpon from other social media.

    StumbleUpon has, however, been adding more features to its site, and seems to want to get users starting from there more often. With the Explore Box disappearing from the toolbar, users who use this frequently (like myself) will have little choice but to oblige.

  • StumbleUpon: We Wanted To Go In This Direction All Along

    Today, StumbleUpon unveiled a new feature that they call the “Explore Box.” Still technically in beta testing, the new feature allows users to search for specific topics to stumble, for example, Lady Gaga, William Faulkner, or Tequila.

    Until now, StumbleUpon allowed users to explore certain areas that most of the time remained relatively broad. Aside from the few specific “interest” categories like “Film Noir,” users were only able to explore categories like “Alternative Rock,” “Food,” or “American Literature.” StumbleUpon offered around 500 of these non-specific categories.

    With the debut of the Explore Box, hundreds of thousands of more specific categories become available to users.

    This afternoon, WebProNews got a chance to talk with Director of Communications Mike Mayzel and VP of marketing and business development Marc Leibowitz. We discussed the stumbling experience and how the new explore box fits in with their goals.

    First off, the addition of a tool to make content discovery a little more specific is not a brand new idea for StumbleUpon. They said that they knew all along that this was a direction that they wanted to go. “A lot of engineering work was needed to make it possible,” they said. It was just about making sure that they had the resources to make it a reality.

    I asked them why they wanted to make a more targeted stumbling experience, to which they brought up user feedback. Users told them that they enjoy the “serendipity of exploring broad topics,” but that it is sometimes “difficult to specify what they wanted to explore with precision.”

    The Explore Box definitely allows for a more precise search.

    But StumbleUpon is not moving towards becoming a search engine, they said. “Stumbling has always been a companion to search.” They added that it was a way to be surprised, to find things that you didn’t know were out there. That randomness is at the core of what makes stumbling what it is.

    They said that they “ultimately have no ambitions of making this a search replacement.”

    Search can sometimes be too specific, and StumbleUpon wants to leave some room for discovery. They discussed a “sweet spot,” a one to three word query inside their Explore Box that will allow users some specificity of topic but not too much. Targeted, but still random.

    When asked about long-term goals of this new way to stumble, Mike and Marc discussed accessibility. They want StumbleUpon to feel “more familiar to more people.” People instinctively look for a box to type words into – that’s the nature of our search engine dominated lives. Until now, you couldn’t really do that with StumbleUpon (except for some users with a Firefox add-on).

    “By enabling users to interact with StumbleUpon in this way, it will broaden the appeal to people used to using a box.”

    StumbleUpon’s explore box runs on the same recommendation engine – one that’s personalized. If two people enter the same query, let’s say “Bacon,” the content that each person sees will differ.

    The Explore Box will not only improve the experience of those who want to stumble more specific topics, they say, but it will also “make recommendations better and better” for those using the service in it’s traditional manner, through selecting less specific categories. The specificity of feedback that they receive via “likes” of content contained in more narrow categories will help them make everyone’s results better.

    Finally, I asked Mike and Marc about the newer content discovery engine on the block, the Google+ Sparks feature. Both are former Google employees and say that they have a “lot of respect for what they do there.” I asked, more specifically, whether or not they saw Sparks as a direct competitor to StumbleUpon. They said that they aren’t quite sure what Sparks wants to be at this early stage, and they’re not entirely sure that Google does either.

    Right now, they are just focused on what they’re doing.

    Have you tried the new Explore Box? What do you think about the new targeted stumbling? Let us know in the comments.

  • StumbleUpon Explore Box Makes Randomness More Specific

    The merits of StumbleUpon are numerous – it’s a wonderful time-occupier and a great place to explore the far corners of the internet. Most of its appeal stems from the fact that it is a “discovery engine,” something related to but entirely different from a standard search engine.

    StumbleUpon’s new Explore Box, however, is putting a little more targeted search into the experience. The new feature, which we told you about last month, is still in beta according to a press release.

    The official StumbleUpon YouTube channel has released this short video explaining the new box. “Easily explore thousands of interests. When you’re interested in something new, the Explore Box has something for you.”

    With the explore box, users can enter specific topics that they want to stumble – for instance, Lady Gaga, Vampires, Bourbon, Guitars. Once they begin stumbling that specific topic, they can easily opt out of it in the top toolbar and go back to stumbling all interests.

    StumbleUpon already lets you narrow your stumbling down to categories, but those categories aren’t all that specific (Music, Art, Technology, American Literature, Alternative Rock). This new Explore Box expands the topics that you can stumble from around 500 to hundreds of thousands.

    @gmc
    Garrett    StumbleUpon’s ExploreBox is live 🙂 http://t.co/qAev4hu 59 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    “Millions of people already enjoy stumbling to be entertained and inspired, and the Explore Box now makes content discovery easier for those who want a more precise way to explore their interests,” said Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon CEO and co-founder. “The Explore Box enables discovery for anything you want to learn about, and surfaces the hidden gems you can’t find anywhere else.”

    The new feature definitely makes the “discovery engine” a little more like a search engine. But it shouldn’t take away from the randomness that makes StumbleUpon so much fun. For instance, my targeted exploration of “Bourbon” netted me articles about different types of Bourbon, recipes with Bourbon, the Bourbon-making process, the French House of Bourbon, and other tangential topics.