I just noticed that Garret over at Stumble has relocated to San Francisco. In asking him if SU had recieved funding, he said that they had recieved “help.” He also said they are upgrading the servers in preperation to an announcment. I think that “help” has come in the form of capital infusion. In considering all this I started to think about StumbleUpon’s long term strategy for staying competitive. The biggest issue I have is how closed Stumble is and how much stronger it would be if it had an api or even a simple data export.
Update: 4/19/2006 Looks like First Round Capital is involved
I can’t wait to see what happens with StumbleUpon. I was thinking about the integration issues with web 2.0- I hate having no connection between all my tools. What about auto thumbing sites I dig on digg.com, or a button to import my newest del.icio.us and digg.com sites when I want to request them? It would be easy just to save the feed url info. I realize realtime updates might be hell but some integration beyond the obscure delicious import would be great.
Wachovia, my bank, introduced a service that brings all my bills, investments, credit accounts, etc into one view that is updated every day. It is just an amazing service that I never realized was so needed. I think SU has the strength to help me with some integration. I see flock as a direct challenger to your user base and because of its open nature there is potential for it to be very disruptive. Obviously the strength of the fabric of your community is so strong, but it seems that somehow capitalizing on other communities installed bases by offering light integration could help stumble maintain its transparent and utilitarian nature in a further fragmented web services environment.
I am using one of the many start pages that has modules for my various RSS feeds. It has been wonderful to bring my various feeds to a page rather than a reader, it allows a very interactive experience with all of my various web 2.0 models. But all of these rss based start pages dont have too much going for them- they are interchangable and transparent. The community + transparency of SU gives you lock-in, and true utility.
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