StumbleUpon Compared To Del.icio.us
wolfger invited me to StumbleUpon, so I joined. My username is MattArnold, so if you're on that service, let's please join networks! It does a lot of what I had hoped del.icio.us would do: Find other web surfers who like a lot of the same web pages that you do, and use that to channel-surf the best-reviewed other sites they like.
Although del.icio.us eventually tacked on a rudimentary feature for finding cool new pages through serendipity effects (by the way, I'm Matt_Arnold on del.icio.us so let's please join networks there as well), it's first and foremost a way to make and save bookmarks on the web, and add tags to them. It seemed to me that as long as so many people were doing this, it should be possible to search the data of everyone's tags and bookmarks and find people whose recommendations I would like. But instead the service focuses its excellence on helping you get to your own bookmarks from any computer, subscribe to anyone's bookmarks as an RSS feed, and conveniently tag pages with metadata for findability, better than StumbleUpon does.
That's why I was so pleased that I could import all my del.icio.us tagged sites, complete with their list of tags, into StumbleUpon. It now has a lot of information about my tastes, with which to automatically correlate me to others.
Although you may add del.icio.us buttons to your Firefox navigation bar that would bookmark and tag the page you're viewing, or bring up your bookmarks page, del.icio.us is a web service that works fine without those conveniences. StumbleUpon, by contrast, requires that you install a plugin for giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to pages, and doesn't work without it.