For virtually a year now, I have been following a cool social skimming addon called StumbleUpon. As of last week, the StumbleUpon addon is available for Web Explorer, and is one of my fave add-ons. This is how it works: As you skim the web, whenever you come across a page that's particular fascinating to you, you can push the thumbs up button in your toolbar.
And if you do not like a page, you can hit the thumbs down button. You do not have to rate each page, just the ones you feel emotional about, and clicking a button in the toolbar is a fairly straightforward way to give feedback.
Now, as StumbleUpon learns what you like and do not like, it immediately matches you with clumps of users who have similar preferences. Then, as you scan, you can opt to stumble to pages that are preferred by folks who are like you. You do not have to share your votes with any one else, but if you opt-in, you help other folks find cool new sites too. Om Malik asserts that it is just addictive, and many others agree.
I find that StumbleUpon can advocate content that's more engaging and topical to me than plenty of the other content filters like techmeme or digg. The addon was at first developed for Firefox, and swiftly became popular. But a tool like StumbleUpon gets smarter when there are ways more folk using it, and the team shortly required to increase the feature to the bulk of Net users who use Net Explorer. News.com and TechCrunch have both commented on the business case for shipping on Internet Explorer, and that is simple enough to understand.
