Are you in for something new that fits your interests and do you want to look further than the ordinary websites? Do you still have room left on your bookmark toolbar for great and unexpected webpages? Go visit StumbleUpon and ‘stumble upon’ your new favorite website!!

StumbleUpon is an online recommendation agent that uses personal preferences of you and others to create so-called virtual communities. These virtual communities consist of like-minded users that share mutual goals or interests and therefore share certain web-surfing behavior. The virtual networks are used to coordinate the websites that users ‘stumble upon’, based on their listed interests and the recommendations of peers and friends (serving as a sort of ‘word-of-mouth’ referral). Don’t worry that the whole website will be full of ads, or that you are secretly redirected to websites only developed by paying advertisers. Only a small part of all StumbleUpon websites are open for advertisers and these ‘stumbles’ will also be matched to the user’s preferences. Besides, also for these websites stumblers can click ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ and rate the content of the page (Stumble Upon).

When you start using this amazing website, just sign in with your e-mail or Facebook account, select your interests to receive your personalized stumbles and hit the ‘Stumble’ button to start browsing! The nice thing about StumbleUpon is that you’re only confronted with one website at a time and that you don’t have to choose between millions of recommendations. This is a big difference with for example Pinterest, where visitors still have to choose what they want to explore and click on. With its browsing model, StumbleUpon protects its visitors from experiencing choice overload; making its users happier following the famous article of Iyengar & Lepper (2000), that states that choice overload in the end can lead to less satisfied customers.

I first started using StumbleUpon, after I was introduced to this website by a fellow-student that liked to visit quirky websites during lecture (ohoh!). So StumbleUpon not only can be used to find your new favorite blog or shopping website, most of the time it also serves as a source of entertainment for the ultimate ‘browser’. Today I filled in Bizarre/Oddities as one of my preferences, since I was looking for a bit of humor. I stumbled upon an Indian car website (??), showing me the following ‘interesting’ pictures that actually do ask for further explanation…

On what favorite new website did you Stumble Upon today?