stumbleupon some fun

www.stumbleupon.com is a dynamic, collaborative approach to collecting interesting, relevant information from the Internet.  It automatically adds content as like minded stumblers recommend content.   “The participation of community members helps maintain a database of the most up-to-date and highest quality sites possible.”  The development  of the product has emerged as a function of multiple inputs.   It competes in the Web 2.0 environment with popular products such as delicio.us, digg, Technorati, Slashdot, Memeorandum, Reddit and Yahoo Bookmarks, Metaweb and the locally produced particls.

Stumbleupon uses technologies such as AJAX, PHP,  jquery and Quantcast( for statistical analysis) for dynamic display and information, while Apache runs in front of Tomcat for the core server functions.  Recently they selected a group of users to test some new features.  They have adopted split testing  features to offer the new design to selected high volume users

New version

Old version

An example of agile user testing enhancing the product,  is that the new version created issues with Firefox3, and a bug in the discovery box in IE7.  The small sample initial test allowed these major browser issues to be resolved before releasing to a wider audience.  Testing identified that simpler layout is often more effective, with the new version removing extra features to restore a cleaner toolbar.  Applications must evolve to better serve their purpose, or die.

Stumbleupon’s core functionality of user recommendation of pages makes the users of this product more comfortable recommending changes, and offering feedback on which features are used and how they are used.  Small regular releases(see StumbleUpon Changelog) is a feature of Perpetual Beta(adopted by many Web 2.0 applications) allowing rapid response to user feedback, and incremental increases in features.  Small subsets of users allow trialing until they are dependable and popular. Data from users should be input back into design as soon as possible.

The proliferation of perpetual beta within Web 2.0 applications is due to the fact that developers now do not require a user to upload a new version every time an update is made, but can now make these changes on their own server(or the cloud)  for a seamless experience.  The internet enables user and server interactions to be recorded and monitored, enabling analysis, change and improvements.  It is all about usability after all!