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.

StumbleUpon's response is that, well, they were "just trying to improve the user experience." And besides, they told us, two-thirds of users use the Web bar.

In other words, if you do want to see direct links, just don't sign in.

What a great solution. Truly. Not only will StumbleUpon not be able to get an idea of that user's taste graph, that user will miss out on the entire community aspect of the site.

Leibowitz cited accidental clicks on the "X" button of the Web bar as StumbleUpon's main reason for getting rid of the Web bar entirely.

"People would accidentally click the button - they don't have an extension such as Chrome or Firefox extensions, so they can't go back to their Stumbling unless they go directly to StumbleUpon.com."

This sounds like a complicated solution for a pretty easy problem. It would it have been pretty easy for StumbleUpon to just add a box that pops up when the user clicks "X." It could say something simple like: "Are you sure you want to close this page and leave StumbleUpon?" Instead, StumbleUpon says, it is thinking only of the users - not the people who receive tons of referral traffic from the StumbleUpon discovery engine.

"The trade off is that we have to make some concessions around the way we show the URL," Leibowitz tells us. "There's no way we can change the way the URL is displayed in the address bar, but there are some ways we can make it easier to copy and paste the source code."

For StumbleUpon users who are still looking for a way to see the direct URL, try using a StumbleUpon Firefox add-on or Chrome extension.

What Will Happen to StumbleUpon Referral Traffic?

"My website used to get 70-80% of referral traffic from StumbleUpon," writes ReadWriteWeb commenter Jeffrey Davis. "After the redesign, that percentage dropped to 40%. I suspect now that it will drop even further...especially since SU is now hijacking the pageview."

Pinterest is now Davis' number two referrer.

This is only one isolated case, but it's telling. Perhaps it's time for marketers to start shifting their strategy from StumbleUpon to Pinterest. Because it doesn't look like StumbleUpon will be backpedaling on its latest decision anytime soon.

Has referral traffic to your site suffered since the StumbleUpon redesign? Tell us about it in the comments.

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.

As you can see, there's no "X" option. If you want to go to the direct link, you'll have to copy and paste out the link above and delete the StumbleUpon URL. Here's what one of those clunky SU link looks like:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1PrjAd/www.modernarttimeline.com/

Would you really take the time to copy and paste the tail of that link into another tab or browser? That's what it'll take to get the direct URL.

StumbleUpon is trying to build up its ecosystem, keeping users inside rather than sending them out to the Web and other social sites. By keeping everyone inside, StumbleUpon will no longer offer prized SEO value that it once did. This will negatively affect referral traffic, especially for sites that rely on StumbleUpon for that nice traffic jolt.

Remember when this happened at Digg? Users revolted, and then-CEO Kevin Rose decided to make the DiggBar optional. Rose even said that framing content "is bad for the Internet."

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.

As of August, StumbleUpon was delivering half of U.S. social media traffic. If the @BreakingNews StumbleUpon channel grows - right now it only has 51 followers and 78 pages - sites that end up on it could see a decent uptake in traffic.

The MSNBC-owned @BreakingNews went international in November, expanding to a London-based UK team. Way back in 2009, when we first covered @BreakingNews, it was run by a 19-year-old named Michael van Poppel. It wasn't long before BNO handed over management to MSNBC. It's a good thing since MSNBCC's own breaking news feed only had about 41,000 followers at the time, while @BreakingNews had 1.4 million. Today that number is at nearly 3.5 million, and that's not counting the new StumbleUpon channel.

Is it essential for publications and Twitter feed aggregators like @BreakingNews to have a StumbleUpon channel? Let us know what you think in the comments.

In Twitter's young history, some have preferred to call it a "micro-blogging site," while still others like the term "social network." Both of those labels can get thrown out the door, however. The über-über-new Twitter (how else are we going to differentiate from past updates?) hasn't rebranded like its discovery engine cousin StumbleUpon, but it does want to start being seen as a "discovery tool" that's focused first and foremost on mobile.

Naturally, Twitter released the redesign to iPhone users first. And why wouldn't it? Twitter is baked into the iOS5 platform, making it a key social layer on iOS devices. The fusing of Twitter into iOS5 tripled Twitter's daily sign-ups, and added to its focus on mobile.

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.

The new channels, which allow users to follow content from sites (The Atlantic Wire), celebrities (Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey) and brands (Gilt, Campbell's Kitchen, Audi), mirror more of a Twitter model. For celebrities and brands, this form of advertising is more subtle and, as a result, less intrusive. The new site also makes it easier to keep track of all the pages, photos and videos that a user has liked in the past; the old version only gave users easy access to posts they had shared.

Earlier this year StumbleUpon launched the Explore Box, a tool that's useful for helping Stumblers find topics related to a single topic. If a user is trying to find topics related to "Sleeping Beauty," for example, type in "Sleeping Beauty" and then a list of related interests pop up, such as "Sleeping Beauty Castle," "The Sleeping Beauty," "Sleeping Bag," "Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore" (OK, the last two were a bit odd, but that's alright). The Explore Box also suggests things it thinks you might like based on the original interest; in this instance, the suggestions are "animation," "France" and "Paris." In the new relaunch, the Explore Box is integrated right into the user experience.

StumbleUpon is a prime example of the read/write web. Why? Because the user literally writes their own "taste graph" by signaling to the service what interests they want to follow. In the e-commerce space, EBay acquired recommendation engine Hunch to do just that - serve up more relevant content to users.

StumbleUpon launched an iPad app back in July. In November, StumbleUpon came to the Kindle Fire.

How do you like the new StumbleUpon? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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.

We reported last month that StumbleUpon delivers half of U.S. social media traffic, so it's an increasingly important channel for Web publishers. This update to the iOS app comes in advance of tomorrow's iPhone event at the Apple headquarters, which is expected to herald a major boost to iOS' market share.

Follow ReadWriteWeb on StumbleUpon

Do you use StumbleUpon on your iOS device?

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.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Social Media Market Share

It has been a good week for StumbleUpon. Earlier this week, it rolled out the Explore Box, which enables users to focus their stumbling by typing in topics, narrowing the scope of their discoveries without taking away the fun randomness.

Do you use StumbleUpon for browsing? For driving traffic to your content? Let us know in the comments.

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*

There's no one-click way to add a topic from the Explore Box to your saved list of interests, which would be a great way to use it to expand one's Web palette. But the selected tag does appear in the interest box on the StumbleUpon toolbar, and logged-in users can get to the control panel for editing interests from there. The Explore Box itself is now displayed in the Interests menu on the toolbar, as well as on the profile settings page for editing interests.

StumbleUpon is the reverse of the process of finding Web content by searching for it. The user just defines the parameters, clicks the big button, sees something new, and develops an interest profile over time by up-voting and down-voting results. These votes further tune the results StumbleUpon delivers. It's an endlessly fun way to explore the Web for users, and it has also been a powerful tool for publishers.

StumbleUpon's impact on traffic can be enormous, and since visitors come to the content because of their existing interest in the topic, the quality is high, too. Its social features enable following of and sharing with other users, as well as sharing via other social media, so good content spreads fast. The new Explore Box should make it even faster for users to find the exact thing they didn't know they were looking for.

Check it out at stumbleupon.com/explore.

Follow ReadWriteWeb on StumbleUpon.

Do you use StumbleUpon? What's your favorite thing about it?

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.

In testing Couch Mode, I've often had to hit the pause button and then play again in order for any of the Vimeo videos to load. The navigation pane disappears too quickly, the browsing function doesn't surface much information through the touch interface and worst of all: Couch Mode doesn't include a full-screen option! It looks like full screen, but the browser remains at the top of your iPad. It's nice to be able to go from one video to the next, but the aesthetic cost is too high for me.

Of course YouTube's Leanback doesn't work on an iPad at all.

Probably the best low-friction way to enjoy a continuous flow of videos on an iPad is the app for StumbleUpon, which we reviewed last month. (StumbleUpon for the iPad: Like a Magic Carpet Ride for Your Brain)

If readers know of a better way to do it, please let us know. It could be argued that an effective tablet lean-back video experience is an essential requirement for any real viable online short-form alternative to traditional TV. That's "meaningful" not just for the industry and its commercial interests, but for the greater diversity of video content and perspectives on the world so well exemplified by Vimeo itself.

It would be great to see Vimeo nail a lean-back experience for the iPad. I don't think they've done it yet though.

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.

Then you click, click, click the Stumble button while zipping around the web, jumping up and down and clapping like a schoolgirl. At least that's the way it works for millions, if not tens of millions, of StumbleUpon users. It's like Pandora for web content. Now it turns your iPad into a magic carpet ride all around the web - and you'll only be richer for it.

MG Siegler at TechCrunch says the new StumbleUpon app is the kind of perfect lean-back experience that the iPad was made for. I think that's true, but I think there's more to it than that.

I think that the Stumble experience is one of the rawest forms of the read-write web around. What the user is writing is their own "taste graph" - a stream of signals concerning their interests that is then used as a platform for development. Today it's mostly used to serve up more webpages, but in the future the taste graph could be used to offer recommendations and other services concerning all kinds of things. That's the theory behind mildly competitive service Hunch, for example.

Stumbling Into Freedom

What does the user get, as a result of writing that personal interest graph? They get serendipity and an expansion of their horizons. Freedom lives within many constraints but one of the most important is our own understanding of what's possible.

By building on top of what we know and like - then quickly expanding out around the related web, StumbleUpon helps us comfortably and enjoyably explore a much larger portion of the web than we might otherwise ever see. One critique of the app: I really wish it showed the URLs you were visiting. URLs are important: to avoid spoofing, to learn about domains, to understand the structure of sites.

StumbleUpon is neither wholly inside nor outside the long-feared silos of like-minded thinkers and their online content, either. It's a great mix of the known and the unknown.

The service places less emphasis on recency than any human editor you'll find, too. It's unafraid to serve up years-old classic videos side-by-side with news from the same day.

In order to most effectively create, we need to know what's possible. Familiarity with prior art isn't necessary for everyone and everything - but getting out of your own provincial circles online is a mind-opening experience and is generally a big net-positive.

That's what Stumble delivers, now more comfortably and pleasingly than ever before - on an iPad: a powerful instrument of freedom.

The StumbleUpon Widget can be used by publishers to surface content on the site with the best shelf life. The widget will come in three sizes and requires a line of script to be embedded on to a webpage. The widget will surface stories and videos suited to the users' interest based on what has been rated highly by the StumbleUpon community of 15 million users.

StumbleUpon claims to be the largest non-Facebook referrer of social media traffic. The company is not specific, but that would likely include Twitter, Reddit, Digg, XYDO and other similar tools for publishers. As of April 2010, StumbleUpon funneled twice as much traffic to publishers as Twitter. The user base is predominately between 18 and 34 years old and split 54% male to 46% female.

StumbleUpon has a couple of other publisher products as well, including badges (which look like any normal share button) and a URL shortener (su.pr). The company claims that publishers get 20-25% more traffic from StumbleUpon when they institute badges.

There are a few drawbacks for publishers. A lot of publishers choose to self-aggregate content within posts or certain locations within their sites. The StumbleUpon widget would take that control from them and automate through the company's index. Another drawback is widget/badge/button fatigue. Share buttons and third-party widgets have to be maintained by publishers and the more of them there are, the more of a time-consuming process it becomes. While the StumbleUpon widget takes up space where there would otherwise be nothing (or unsold ad inventory), it is another piece of real estate on the page.

Increasingly, it is hard to justify clutter for the sake of utilizing empty space. Facebook and Twitter both have widgets as well, and those ecosystems have millions more users than StumbleUpon does. Sometimes, simpler is just better.

If you are a publisher, does the StumbleUpon widget seem like a good idea? Do content consumers care about clutter on a page? Let us know in the comments.

Today's Companies:

StumbleUpon, the popular discovery engine that recommends the best sites for interests that the user specifies, raised $17m in a Series B round of financing. Tier 3, a cloud-computing service based in Seattle, raised $8.5m.

DailyBooth is a photo-based social networking site, which enables users to capture images of themselves and upload them daily in a process known as, "boothing." It raised $6m in its first round of funding. Stack Exchange recently changed its name from Stack Overflow and raised $12m in a Series B round of of funding. Stack Exchange is a network of 46 question and answer sites, covering a wide breadth of topics. For example, I explored the cooking forum and learned about how to prevent my homemade soup from sticking to the bottom of my pot.

Flite (formerly Widgetbox) is a web-based advertising platform that raised $12m in Series C investments. Grid2Home, a smart grid software developer based in San Diego, raised $12m according to an SEC filing.

Startup Digest, a members-only email service that lists the best startup opportunities and happenings in 50+ cities raised $200,000 in funding from the Kauffman Foundation. MindSnacks makes learning games for touch-based devices and it raised $1.2m from an assortment of investors. Their focus is on short, "bite-sized," interactive language learning experiences.

Again, we've got eight very different companies raising funding, which do you think could take that money and change the world?

As someone who's recently made the switch from iPhone to Android, I can attest that finding apps in the Android Market is not easy. "Currently, discovering apps from the over 100,000 apps available in the Android Market is limited to keyword-based search features," says StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp. "With StumbleUpon App Discovery, users can now find applications that are personally recommended to them and in many cases would previously have gone unnoticed."

FriendShuffle is a delightfully simple service just launched tonight. Log in with Facebook Connect and it will create a web-framed slideshow of the pages "Liked" by your friends on Facebook. Shuffle through, discover new content recommended by trusted sources with similar interests (your friends) and Like some of it yourself.

It's a great example of how simply putting a new interface on top of an established API can lead to hours of fun. This is the best interface I've seen yet for enjoying the links your Facebook friends have shared. It's like StumbleUpon but the algorithm is social, not behavioral.

As Bango CEO Ray Anderson points out, BlackBerry and Apple still dominate, together accounting for nearly two-thirds of the mobile Web market.

"Even with the advent of Apples new iAd platform and Google's acquisition of AdMob, BlackBerry still represents the best volume opportunity for mobile advertising in the USA", says Anderson. "Apple appears to be losing ground to the latest Android handsets from HTC, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung, showing the slowest quarterly growth in Web browsing."

So what is the take-away from this latest set of data? It would appear that the device fragmentation of the Android market is helping the platform by continually adding to its volume of users. Developers should be encouraged by the increased traffic on Android devices, both from mobile Web and app usage, as the platform's growth seems to be building steam.

Unfortunately for Android fans, not all of them are.

Just today, the Nieman Journalism Lab released an iPhone app while arguing against the creation of an Android app. To paraphrase lab director Joshua Benton, the organization doesn't feel an Android version of its app is necessary because a very small amount of its traffic comes from Android devices. While it makes sense to serve its largest group of customers first, it should behoove them to release an Android app precisely because Android users are their smallest group.

As we saw last week, many more notable mobile applications are embracing the demand for Android apps. GetGlue launched an Android app in just a few weeks after its iPhone app helped traffic explode and angry Android users flooded the company's inbox demanding an app. StumbleUpon, when making its first forays into mobile applications last week, made a smart choice by releasing iPhone and Android apps simultaneously.

Bango's latest data is just further evidence of the expanding Android platform and the growing risk of underserving this segment of the market.