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StumbleUpon is one of those sites we've had on our radar for quite some time. We covered the company's redesign last year, which re-focused the site on topic features. So when StumbleUpon snuck in a strange change the other day without telling anyone, we were shocked. This update made it impossible to get direct links for the pages one is stumbling unless they choose to not sign-in to the service.

The entire point of StumbleUpon, for the user, is to build up a taste graph that will better deliver stories that the user would like. But many sites depend on referral traffic from StumbleUpon, which is something outside of the StumbleUpon user's direct stumbling experience.

When StumbleUpon did its big rebranding, reorganizing and redesign late last year, we figured that the 20-million-plus discovering engine was done making big changes. At least, for a little while. Boy were we wrong.

The newest SU update removes all direct links. Previously, once you were inside StumbleUpon, you could "X" out the page and go straight to the original site. Now if you're logged in, you have to say in the iframed version of the site. There is one way to get out, but it's super clunky.

The Twitter handle @breakingnews has approximately 3,379,339 Twitter followers. Today, it announced the launch of its very own StumbleUpon channel, a new feature available in the StumbleUpon redesign. This makes discovering @breakingnews content on StumbleUpon less serendipitous and more Twitter-like.

In its blog post, @breakingnews acknowledged that it was the only branded channel that curated stories from other sources. Other publications on StumbleUpon Channels, such as BuzzFeed, CNNMoney, ELLE and Seventeen, just to name a few, either aggregate content or produce original content. BreakingNews picks up on organizations that do break stories, sending more traffic back to them. The new StumbleUpon channel will give those publications an extra boost in traffic.

This week, serendipity engine StumbleUpon launched an entirely redesigned site, complete with a new logo and a focus on topic features. A few days later, Twitter announced big updates to its user interface, completely changing the experience to focus more on a supposedly simpler user interface that tries to change hashtags from a symbol for trending topics to a space for discovery. The race for top discovery engine is on. What's more notable is that this entire experience is focused on grabbing the mobile user's attention.

StumbleUpon is on a roll. As of August 2011, the U.S.'s biggest serendipity engine drove drive half of all social media traffic, surpassing Facebook, the social network that formerly held that bragging right.

Today StumbleUpon announces a complete overhaul of its platform and logo, as it aims to make the site more visually oriented and simpler to use. Now the user profile makes visible all connections, comments, interests, channels, likes, shares, inbox and history. All of a user's thumbs-up are visible through the profile. The new StumbleUpon also features channels, which are essentially sponsored Twitter-like accounts that a user can follow. Plus, the layout looks a lot more like its social network cousin, Pinterest.

Serendipitous Web discovery engine StumbleUpon has released version 2.0 of its iOS app. The update adds the Explore Box, a search box that suggests new topics to stumble, and faster page loading. The iPhone app also received a significant interface overhaul, adding side-to-side page swiping and less cluttered navigation.

We already found StumbleUpon for iPad to be like a magic carpet ride for your brain, and the addition of the Explore Box will make discovery even faster. The Explore Box launched for the StumbleUpon Web version in August.

According to StatCounter's measurements, StumbleUpon has just surpassed Facebook and now delivers more than half of all social media referral traffic in the U.S. StumbleUpon founder and CEO Garrett Camp tweeted the news this afternoon.

Facebook achieved this goal in April of 2010, but StumbleUpon was already well on its way. At that time, StumbleUpon already gave twice as many referrals as Twitter. StumbleUpon's user experience is fanciful and fun, but its traffic power for publishers is quite serious. While the other social networks make the headlines, StumbleUpon has been a quiet success story. In light of today's news, it won't be so quiet for long.

Serendipitous discovery engine StumbleUpon has just launched an Explore Box on its Web version, which allows users to find topics to explore by typing them in. StumbleUpon delivers a new website or video with one click of a button, and it uses a deep list of topic tags, or 'interests,' to keep track of the kinds of content users like. The best way to fine-tune one's StumbleUpon results is by manually subscribing to a bunch of interests first. The Explore Box allows users to filter results in new ways on the spot.

There's no Explore Box on StumbleUpon's celebrated iOS and Android apps yet, but StumbleUpon is even more powerful on the desktop browser where it began. For a service that magically delivers new content with one click, a search box might sound like too much work, but it's not. The Explore Boxis just a starting point for stumbling upon a specific topic, and in a way, it's just as magical. Under the results of a query, the box displays some more topics "you might also like." Hey, why not? See what happens. *click*

Vimeo, probably the best site on the internet to watch artistic short videos, announced an expansion of its lean-back feature called Couch Mode today. The feature, which offers a browsing interface that was initially optimized for Google TV, can now be enjoyed anywhere. Couch Mode makes it easy to move from one video right into the next, without using the traditional website navigation. You can access it from the corner of any page on the site.

Vimeo's Ryan Hefner said in a blog post today that Couch Mode "works great" on iPads and Android tablets. In my testing of the feature today I did not find that to be the case.

When the iPad was launched, people across the geek-o-sphere condemned it as a dumb chunk of glass "for consumption only" - a tool incapable of facilitating content creation and possibly a threat to the future of human creativity. "The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing," wrote Alex Payne. "[If] I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I'd never be a programmer today."

That may very well be, but the new iPad app that popular web exploration network StumbleUpon released this week goes a long way towards compensating for whatever risks to creativity that the device poses. If you've got an iPad, I think it's a must-have app. That's true for everyone, including for kids.