The most recent StumbleUpon Toolbar (v. 3.05) includes a new feature called StumbleThru, which allows users to stay on a specific web site while stumbling through pages that they might enjoy. Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, WordPress, The Onion, and CNN are some of the sites currently enabled (as are the .edu and .gov domain names).
It’s a cool way to find those YouTube videos or Onion articles that will appeal most to you. But I agree with Rafe Needleman – StumbleUpon should release this functionality through an API and let sites include a “Stumble” button. If the reader is a StumbleUpon user, it will take them to a page on the site that they’ll like. If they aren’t, it should take them to a random page on that site and can prompt them to become a StumbleUpon user to get more customized results.
Creating a link to take readers to a random post is a good idea and would only take a couple of minutes to code in WordPress (we’ll do it for fun this afternoon). If StumbleUpon gives away the functionality, my guess is a lot of sites would integrate it to increase page views.
Update: There’s now a WordPress plugin to generate a random post redirect within the blog. We’ve integrated it. More here.
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