10 Membranes

StumbleUpon

Everything about the front page of StumbleUpon is, IMO, good. It looks shiny, designed, cool, webby without following a cliched web 2.0 application look. It feels like SU is offering a unique and interesting service, even if that service is not quite clear at first glance. I was planning to use SU for some research, and had some positive initial experiences despite the interfaces being confusingly fiddly and overly feature laden, finding some cool stuff with the random SU button.

However they have cocked it up. The SU bar on my home Firefox doesn’t work, it denies me access to the account when I try and give a positive rating to a site, thus denying me to contribute the data that would make it a valuable tool. Given the proliferation of possible services then this is just careless, annoying and bad. Web patience must be a fraction of the already diminshed meatspace version- I am no exception.

I read in the Alley Insider blog that SU has revenues of $10.5 million, of which roughly $5 million was profit. Well done, but can you sort out your Firefox plug ins?