Sunday, 8 November 2009

Stumbleupon.com: the Definitive Solution Against Boredom?

I am sure this has already happened to you: you are sitting in front of your pc and want to surf the web, but you have no idea on where to go... Inspiration is lacking... You start getting bored... You probably end up wasting time in Facebook by looking at pictures of people you barely know. Does it happen to you? Well, it happens to me! The interesting thing is: I may have discovered the definitive solution against boredom. I mean, I haven't really discovered it, I just found it by chance. It is called Stumbleupon. According to Wikipedia:

"StumbleUpon is an Internet Community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles."

Apart from the definition, what you get is simply a random walk through the web with the high probability of stumbling on something interesting. You can download the toolbar or simply go to stumbleupon.com and start by clicking on the Stumble! button. Every time you click on it you are redirected almost randomly to a new website. I said almost randomly because you can set your preferences (e.g.: music, art, culture, technology, etc...). When you stumble on a page you can rate it. You don't have to subscribe, but if you think you are going to use it more than once you'd better to, in fact if you start rating pages, after a while, you get more tailored results. I think it is definitely an interesting way to navigate the web; it allows you to discover pages you would never discover otherwhise.

Here are some of the sites I have found. Incredibly useless, but worth visiting:

A wonderful little game. You just have to click around and try to understand what you can do. The aim of the game is to get the little men to complete the mission. Nerd satisfaction guarantee!

Here you can write yourself an email and decide when you want to have it delivered.

I don't know what this site is about, but it is totally sick.

...and many other nice (actually more useful) pages! Hope you can discover something interesting yourself. Enjoy!

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