At The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, StumbleUpon, the veteran content discovery platform, will be announcing “its first major integration with Android,” says Co-founder Garrett Camp. What does that mean? Well, nearly as we can tell, Google is calling on a handful of apps at MWC to showcase the new integration possibilities (with Google+ and other Google products) that are part of Android 4.0 — otherwise known as Ice Cream Sandwich. Android will be featuring (promoting) StumbleUpon at MWC, thanks to some new updates to its Android app that go live today.

For some quick background, in October, StumbleUpon brought its tablet experience to Android, and then not long after, pushed a major redesign, in which it offered a new streamlined user experience, improvements to its recommendation algorithms, as well as the introduction of brand channels.

StumbleUpon is endeavoring to add a level of serendipity into the way people discover content on the Web, by way of its “Stumble” button, which takes users to random (yet personalized) articles, blog entries, etc. that can be specified by topic, like “Technology or “Arts,” for example. Introducing brand channels allows users to follow, say, ESPN so that when clicking “Stumble,” users begin seeing ESPN in their sports content.

Today, all these updates, including brand channels and the streamlined interface, will officially be rolled out across StumbleUpon’s mobile apps, on iPhone and iPad, Android, NOOK Color and Kindle Fire. Of course, with StumbleUpon’s new partnership with Google/Android, Ice Cream Sandwich users will now be able to take advantage of some cool new features unique to the OS. (You can download the updated Android app here.)

This means that users of StumbleUpon’s Android app can take advantage of Android Beam to share any content they discover on the app to other NFC-enabled devices running ICS. The app will also feature the Android Action Bar, allowing users to explore the Web via the Android navigation interface.

Also of note: StumbleUpon will have a resizable widget on your device’s homescreen, which means that users can preview the service’s content right from the homescreen, without having to launch the app. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Google OS if, in addition to enabling users to share on Facebook, Twitter, etc., it didn’t include a sharing button for G+. And, for that matter, StumbleUpon users can now sign in directly with their Google/Gmail login — on any Android device, or on the desktop.

This is part of StumbleUpon’s latest push to capitalize on its growing usage on mobile, as the number of Stumbles grew 800 percent last year, and have been growing 35 percent month-over-month over the last quarter. Right now, mobile accounts for 25 percent of the app’s total “Stumbles,” but the team expects that to grow significantly over the next six months, and obviously they expect that easy Gmail sign-in will give them a boost on Android phones and tablets.

It could be big for StumbleUpon, which is now seeing 1.2 billion Stumbles per month across platforms, and has over 20 million registered users. As for plans going forward, StumbleUpon Director of Communications Mike Mayzel tells us that the company will be focusing on three main buckets: Mobile, international, and syndication (through launching its APIs). While the first two are fairly straightforward, more of a unified presence on mobile, and a higher focus on international markets, the last means that StumbleUpon wants to bring its serendipitous content discovery mechanism to your website — to allow your visitors to Stumble onto your best content.

For more, check out StumbleUpon at home here.

Content discovery platform StumbleUpon, which just launched a much improved iPad app in August, now brings that same user experience to Android with the very first StumbleUpon app designed specifically for Android tablets (the app was previously only available for the Android phone). The app is ready for download in the Android Market here.

The new StumbleUpon Android tablet has basically the same functionality as the new iPad app (even though at first run-through some of the swipe features seem faster on the iPad).

In addition to releasing an Android tablet version, StumbleUpon is unifying its features across all mobile apps. The most notable change is that the company is bringing the Explore box, which was previously only available through its web interface, to all its mobile platforms. Users can now explore through over a half million interests options via mobile, StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp tells me, by hitting the home button on whatever app they’re using and entering their preferred Interest keyword in the Explore box. I chose to stumble through the interest category “Fashion,” for example (of course).

Swipe-to-stumble, a feature previously available only on the iPad app, is also now a standard feature across all mobile StumbleUpon apps. The feature lets users employ a Flipboard-esque “swipe” gesture in order to move on to the next piece of content.

The iPad app’s content pre-loading is also to be found on all StumbleUpon mobile apps as of today, improving page load time in order to make the stumbling experience faster.

StumbleUpon mobile is still growing 35% month over month Camp tells me,  and he thinks it’s because people use their mobile devices and specifically tablets for entertainment, “If you’re talking about the vacation you’re going to take next month it’s a lot easier to swipe through the term ‘Costa Rica’ than complete a hunt and peck search,” he says.

“The tablets are much more about wanting to be entertained, the experience of browsing on a tablet is so fun,” he continues. “StumbleUpon is like having your own personal channel … your own personalized tour of the Internet.”

Camp’s future plans for the StumbleUpon mobile apps include perfecting the current UI changes in addition to adding social notification features a la Foursquare and Instagram. Today marks the first time the company has made all of their mobile functionality consistent.

Since its inception, StumbleUpon has always been one of the most perfect lean-back apps. Long before anyone even used that term, the StumbleUpon toolbar took various pages on the web and allowed you to quickly jump between them to find new things of interest. This concept seems perfect for a device like the iPad. Unfortunately the app just wasn’t very good. Until today.

StumbleUpon has just launched an entirely redesigned and rebuilt iPad app to finally bring the experience iPad users deserve. “I feel like stumbling is perfect for the iPad — for sitting on the couch. It never took off like we wanted,” founder Garrett Camp says, talking about the first iteration of their app for the iPad (which was built by a contractor). “We decided we were going to re-do it from the ground up. We re-did the interface. It’s much better than before. It’s almost like a black version of Flipboard,” he says.

And that’s a good comparison. Flipboard is often looked at as the pinnacle of media consumption design for the iPad sor far. But it’s mainly concerned with text. StumbleUpon’s app takes on both web pages and things like pictures, and videos, which have become vital parts of the stumbling experience — particularly on mobile devices.

Camp notes that mobile usage of StumbleUpon is soaring. On the iPhone and Android devices, the service is growing 35 percent month to month, he says (compared with 20 percent overall). Since the mobile apps launched last August, a full 10 percent of stumblers now visit that way, he notes. With this new iPad experience, Camp believes they can take tablet usage which is now hovering around 1 percent and at least triple it. Again, it’s a form factor that just seems natural for the service.

The iPad experience now has things like swipe-to-stumble, the ability to flick through content. And the app pre-loads content, meaning they look to see what you’re next stumble will be and they pre-load it so you can flick and see the new content instantly.

But the coolest addition in Camp’s view is the Social Bar. It’s a new gray bar that resides at the top of the app that shows the user who submitted the page you’re on and links to their profile. “Right now, you can’t easily access who liked the page. You might not know who it came from,” Camp says of the mobile apps. They’ve updated the iPad, iPhone, and Android apps to now all have this. “It’s a much more social kind of experience,” he says, noting that in the future, they’ll extend it to including friends’ comments and tweets, etc.

“I think we’ll now fit into other slots of people’s free time,” Camp says of the new iPad experience. “It’s just like the iPhone experience that people love, but it’s so much better on the big screen,” he says.

You can find the new StumbleUpon app for iPad in the App Store here.

There aren’t many startup founders that have done what Garrett Camp has done. After selling content discovery service StumbleUpon to eBay for $75 million in 2007, Camp and investors decided to buy it back for a reported $29 million in 2009.

After the initial Series A that was folded back into the spinoff, Camp raised $17 million from August Capital, Accel, and others in a Series B just last week, making StumbleUpon the most rare of comeback success stories.

Thus far buying yourself back after an acquisition is a feat that’s only been accomplished on a large scale by Webshots (which bought itself back from Excite@Home and resold itself to Cnet) and Skype, which also bought itself back from eBay. Andrew Dreskin, the founder of TicketFly, who sold his former company TicketWeb to TicketMaster and proceeded to directly compete with his former owner, also deserves an honorable mention here.

I sat down with Camp during SXSW to talk about the process of reacquiring your company, what he plans on doing with the StumbleUpon’s rare second chance, and which startup he likes better, StumbleUpon or Uber (of which he is a co-founder).

Highlights:

On the motivation behind the acquisition: “A desire for flexibility. I think bigger companies require more approvals, it takes longer to get stuff done. So I thought we would grow a lot faster if we were a smaller company.”

On the advantages of being part of a larger company: “The great thing about eBay is that I could totally focus on product, totally focused on engineering, I didn’t have to deal with fundraising, I didn’t have to deal with all the operational issues you have at a company. Because I was focused on that we actually grew really well. We tripled in size during out time there. We were there times bigger when we left than when we came in.”

On whether he’s more excited about StumbleUpon or Uber (the company he co-founded with Travis Kalanick: “That’s like saying ‘which is your favorite kid?’ I mean that’s hard to pick. Uber was basically a side project …”

Advice to other founders that find themselves bored post acquisition: “The decision you want to make is ‘Do you want to keep working on what you’re working on?’”

Pulling a phoenix from the ashes is that simple, except when it’s not.

Said StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp,

“With this new investment, we will make it even easier for people to find interesting and relevant content on the Web, whether they are on their desktop, mobile device or even TV.”

StumbleUpon has had an interesting history, being snatched up by eBay  in 2007 and then bought back by its founders for a rumored $29 million plus in 2009. Currently the service has 14 million users and now serves up over 800 million “Stumbles,” or recommendations, a month.

This is counting as its second round of funding, in addition to a pre-eBay $1.5 million seed round in 2005, and the seed investment of founder Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Ram Shriram, Accel Partners and August Capital after they bought the company back in 2009.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post submitted by Mahendra Palsule, who has worked as an Editor at Techmeme since 2009. Apart from curating tech news, he likes analyzing trends in startups and the social web. He is based in Pune, India, and you can follow him on Twitter.

What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?

This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.

The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it.

Relevance is the only solution to the problem of information overload.

The above matrix is a representation of how the process of online information discovery has evolved over time.

Phase I: The Search Dominated Web

This is how Google began its dominance over the web two decades ago, using PageRank to surface the most popular web pages as identified by other web pages that linked to them.

Phase II: Web 2.0 With Social Bookmarking

In the Web 2.0 era, social bookmarking services gained significant traction, surfacing popular content. Sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon are hugely popular even today, driving millions of page views.

Phase III: Personalized Recommendations

Services like Hunch, GetGlue, etc. have focused on building an Interest Graph for users, to deliver personalized recommendations using a ‘taste engine’.

Phase IV: Personalized Serendipity

The latest crop of startups is focusing on personalization using a combination of Interest and Social Graphs. Personalized Serendipity is what Jeff Jarvis calls ‘Unexpected Relevance’. Examples include Gravity, my6sense, Genieo, and TrapIt.

What Exactly Is Relevance?

The battle against information overload is sometimes presented as a choice between Relevance and Popularity, where ‘relevant’ is equated to ‘personalized’ as against popular.

However, Relevance does not always mean Personalized. Relevance is very dynamic – it depends on the needs of a person at a specific point in time. There are times when users want to know about the most popular stories, and other times when they seek personalized content.

There are multiple approaches to filtering information for Relevant Content. Google, Paper.li, and PostRank are examples of algorithmic filtering, while Reddit, Hacker News use a crowdsourcing approach. Klout can be used to filter Twitter streams by influence, while Facebook uses social affinity as a filter for its newsfeed and social signals for its new Comments Plugin. Location is another high-impact signal for delivering relevant content, gaining importance in a mobile world.

In other words, Relevance spans across all the quadrants of the Discovery Matrix above, and none of the above approaches to filtering for relevance is the ‘best approach’. There is no killer approach to Relevance. Henry Nothhaft, Jr., CMO of TrapIt, described it as “the myth of the sweet spot”. The competitive edge will be with services that support multiple discovery methods, multiple filtering approaches, have flexibility, and support multiple mobile platforms.

Quora: A Showcase Of The Interest Graph

Quora has pioneered the use of the Interest Graph as a dominant signal for its newsfeed. Quora asks new users to select Topics to follow, as part of its onboarding process, which is the first revelation that Topics are as important as Users to follow.

Quora’s newsfeed is an interesting showcase of what happens when you mix an Interest Graph with a Social Graph – and the result is the mysterious addictiveness so many have experienced, but found difficult to explain. An item pops up in your newsfeed not because you were following a user, but because you were following a related topic.

This often leads to Personalized Serendipity – or Unexpected Relevance – which is why Quora gets many people hooked.

The war over the Interest Graph began between Twitter and Facebook last year, as Erick described so eloquently. So how did Quora beat them to this game?

For starters, Quora is built from the ground-up with the Interest Graph being a backbone of the framework. Twitter’s ‘Browse Interests’ is too broad and primitive to be of use, even at present. And while Facebook has a mechanism for allowing publishers to push new items to your feed, most publishers have been unaware of this functionality.

This is also the reason why Facebook’s Like Button now publishes a full news feed story. The future clearly belongs to who best captures the Interest Graph as Max Levchin and Bill Gurley put it.

The implications of a Relevance-driven web are wide-ranging and broad in scope. Better utilization of the Interest Graph by services will lead to better ad targeting, and a potential decrease in reliance on CPM/CPC-based advertising. Monetization focus will be on higher yields through transactions and subscriptions as Dave McClure once described. Online media publishers will focus on Relevance Metrics revealing engagement and time-spent on site, than primitive metrics like page views and traffic.

Social media may lose its obsession with follower numbers and traffic, evolving to context-driven reputation systems and algorithms.

Interest Graphs will be used to build Better Social Graphs. Today’s monolithic Interest Graph will get further specialized into Taste Graphs, Financial Graphs, Local Network Graphs, etc., yielding higher relevance for different needs.

The Age of Relevance beckons!

Social discovery service StumbleUpon made headlines yesterday when CEO Garrett Camp tweeted out that it had surpassed Facebook in terms of referral traffic on StatCounter.

According to Statcounter, StumbleUpon is now responsible for 43% of all major social media site (StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Myspace and Digg) traffic on the 15 billion pageviews that the analytics service tracks. Facebook is at 38%.

When a company with 13 million users is outpacing one with 500 million on one specific metric,  additional context is needed to understand exactly what is going on.

I spoke with Camp earlier today about what exactly this recent news means for the company and why StumbleUpon seems to be killing it since August, clocking in about 1.9 million unique visitors in November according to Comscore. The site has served up over 700 million “Stumbles” (referral pageviews to other websites) in December 2010 compared to 400 million Stumbles in December of 2009, according to internal analytics.

Camp says that the service has been growing at 20% month over month for the last couple of months, partially because it introduced StumbleUpon for the iPhone and Android in August and an iPad app in April. Mobile engagement, which represents 5% of all Stumbles, is growing at 40%. Web-only Stumbling, as opposed to the vast oeuvre of browser plugins and toolbars, is growing at a 25% rate. The site also gains around 500-600K new registered users monthly on average and boasts a 40% daily active user rate.

“We’re becoming a little more useful” says Camp on the recent traffic spikes, “Discovery as opposed to keyword search is just a better way to find information.” Camp also explains the discrepancy between Facebook and StumbleUpon’s end goals in contributing to referral traffic, “Facebook is by design trying to keep you on Facebook, but with us every time you click we’re sending referrals to other sites,” he continues, “like Google our goal is to take you to a new site.”

A confluence of factors led to the latest milestones, says StumbleUpon VP of Business Development Marc Leibowitz:

“The growth curve has also steepened recently because of the introduction of more overtly social features (eg, finding & inviting real-world friends) to complement the less obvious but long-standing social aspects of StumbleUpon (eg, algorithmically determined like-minded users); the improving usability of the service (eg, “show me more from [this domain, topic, user]“; better onboarding); and probably the overall proliferation of content, which has increased the demand for easy-to-use, adaptive curation tools like StumbleUpon (see also Google’s experiments w News & Reader).”

StumbleUpon is also breaking even according to Camp, and at around 65 employees that means revenue is in the ballbark of 10 million annually (When asked if this guess was accurate, Leibowitz told me “You’re not bad at math.” This is not true.). In any case, beating Facebook at anything is a hell of a way to start 2011 strong. Congrats guys.

Editor’s note: Henry “Hank” Nothhaft, Jr. is the co-founder and CMO of Trapit, a virtual personal assistant for Web content still in private beta that was incubated out of SRI and the CALO project (as was Siri, the conversational search engine bought by Apple).

One of the most interesting concepts to emerge in media and tech lately is that of “serendipity”—showing people what they want even if they didn’t ask for it.

Despite its seemingly ubiquitous invocation, however, the concept of serendipity remains ill-defined and put forth as some vague panacea for a slew of emerging innovations hoping to attract new users in droves.  What is needed is a closer look at what we actually mean when we talk about serendipity.

From Search to Discovery

Eric Schmidt’s recent remarks about Google as a “Serendipity Engine” (and Facebook’s quick reply), emphasize an important shift in our daily interaction with the Web and how we use it.  Google-driven search provided us with an expectation of finding what we are looking for with increased precision.  But the rise of Facebook’s social relevance algorithms brought about more personalized content discovery based on the human graph—who we know and what they are reading, watching, or passing along.

In fact, I’d argue that we’re seeing the dominant portion of our interaction with Web content shift from search to discovery.

Jeff Jarvis has perhaps most succinctly defined the concept of serendipity, arguing that serendipity is simply “unexpected relevance.”  His explanation opens an entirely new can of worms, however, in the recognition that relevance is relative.

In seeking to achieve serendipity, the individual reader becomes both the target of content delivery mechanisms and the genesis of what that content may be. This is why serendipity is so closely associated with personalization—it requires a high-resolution understanding of the user.

Serendipity and personalization are in fact two sides to the same coin.  Personalization merely acknowledges intimacy, whereas serendipity pretends to have happened on it as if by accident.

Of course serendipity is not, in fact, at all random. In reality, it’s quite scientific. Good serendipity is a slight of hand—it requires deep and granular knowledge, and the fact of its seeming to happen by accident is an artifact of naivety, if anything.

Serendipity is really just an informed calculation based upon any number of our individually unique interests, habits, location, the time and date, and prior knowledge. This level of relevance is, of course, what the emerging personalized Web hopes to achieve for each user, whether for recommendations (GetGlue; Hunch), marketing and ads (Rapleaf; Facebook advertising), or news and content (my company, TrapIt).

Below I run through four different kinds of serendipity—each has its pros and cons. I end by talking about them all taken together, and “the myth of the sweet spot”.

Editorial Serendipity

Editorial Serendipity is the first and oldest form, the process of combining articles that we know we want to read (the day’s headlines) with unexpected stories (features, profiles, restaurant reviews). Yet the editorial voice and direction of a paper or aggregator is hardly serendipitous; it is a calculation of demographics and readership, whether you’re the New York Times, the Drudge Report, or TechCrunch.

On the plus side here, the human element of editorial serendipity (someone making decisions on what content to deliver) provides an effective flexibility of interest. The downside is that editorial serendipity is delivered by another’s interests, or at best their perception of their audience’s interests. Though the content’s relevance is targeted to a certain demographic of readers, it is a necessarily broad sweep of potential readers, and the level of interest is based on the editors’ perception of what is most in tune with those readers or what she thinks they should be interested in based on her own judgement.

Examples: Newspapers/Magazines, Curated Aggregators

Social Serendipity

Much of our content discovery now comes from the virtual watercooler of what our social circle is sharing directly online. The social aspect of staying informed with what our friends are discussing is valuable, not only for keeping “in the loop,” but also simply for the notion that what our friends like is parallel to our own interests.

The benefit of social serendipity is that our social groups have always been a primary indicator of how we choose to define ourselves and our interests. If something is important or relevant to our friends, there is a high likelihood that it is also relevant to ourselves, as well. The con is that social serendipity is therefore largely public by necessity, and thus a projection of ourselves we would present to others or like to be seen. The propensity to amplify the echo-chamber of like-mindedness is also exaggerated, whereas the goal of serendipity largely lies in the surprise and delight of unexpected content.

Examples: Facebook, Twitter

Crowdsourced Serendipity

Bridging the gap between editorial and social serendipity, the notion of crowdsourced relevance really only delivers a broad, lowest-common-denominator level of content discovery. While not without its usefulness to the degree that we want to be aware of what is most popular and most talked about, the trade-off is the lack of personalization.

The pro here is the viral component, which makes up a great deal of our online content-discovery routines. Crowdsourced serendipity provides a tier of distribution in touch with a larger zeitgeist, from trivial cat videos to important broad-based news. The downside is that the lowest common denominator lacks any precision and therefore has limited utility.

Examples: StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg

Algorithmic Serendipity

Opposite editorial serendipity, the notion of algorithmic serendipity is the hardest to do well, but the most promising for future innovation. (Bias alert: this is the approach we are trying at TrapIt)

Based-upon any given set of data points, content is personalized to provide both the relevant, need-to-know information of news and content correlating to our interests, with varying degrees of flexibility through both active and passive inputs.

The best aspect of algorithmic serendipity is that it places the user back at the center of defining relevance. Content delivery emanates from the user, whether consciously or in the background based on habit. It also provides for a level of adjustability and fine-tuning based on individualized input and how narrowly or broadly a user may want the information delivered to him.

The con with algorithmic serendipity is that we need to be careful not to completely lose the human element of engagement, no matter how accurate the algorithm is. Of course, the biggest hindrance is that unlike the other forms of serendipity, a finely-tuned algorithmic Serendipity Engine has yet to be effectively realized. Still, it needs to only be the starting point rather than end point of achieving personalized serendipity.

Examples: Genieo, My6Sense, TrapIt

The Myth of the Sweet Spot

The challenge for any conception of serendipity, regardless of type, is the prevailing notion of a mythical “sweet spot” for users.

In all of the forms of content delivery outlined above, there is a notion that we can hone in on a user’s interests and find the right balance of relevance.  Presenting any such balance as stable or definitive is pure folly. We humans have no “sweet spot”—our interests are evolving and fluid in realtime.

To some extent, this recognition is obvious. Our interests change and evolve over time. Yet for the kind of precision that seeks to provide consistent serendipity in the ways we have been discussing, the indicators need to be equally sensitive.

The content that I want, and better yet, the content that I don’t even know that I want, is an ever-changing proposition based on any number of factors. To achieve that level of sophisticated customization requires a sensitive understanding of context for any proposed “serendipity engine”, both a context of the content and the user.

In the end, relevance is a goal based on context. The impossibility of fully understanding every intricacy of context at any given moment makes achieving the mythical, consistent sweet spot of serendipity impossible. Recognizing that serendipity is a constantly moving target of context, the best we can hope to achieve are fleeting moments relevance.

Photo credit: Flickr/Jennifer Konig

Discovery engine StumbleUpon recently announced App Discovery, a free beta feature of its Android app that basically suggests mobile apps based on a user’s individual interests and preferences and those of friends and like-minded users.

Turns out people love to stumble, even on the go.

Asked if the feature has taken off, the company told me that, in the 2 weeks following its release, they’ve recorded more than 1 million App stumbles already. Considering the fact there are over 100,000 apps for the Android platform at this point, there’s clearly a need for such app discovery services.

StumbleUpon’s Android app not only recommends native applications, but also Web content. The company tells me, already, 25% of all stumbles are for applications, which means the large majority of people still use StumbleUpon the same way they do on their desktops.

Either way, StumbleUpon tells me downloads of its free Android app have soared, doubled even, since the new feature was introduced.

And here are the top 5 most installed Android apps that were discovered by users through StumbleUpon’s App Discovery feature:

- Angry Birds (but of course)

- Camera 360

- Google Sky Map

- Gmote 2.0

- Alchemy

If you’re interested in checking out the app and feature, you should also size up other app discovery services for Android, such as Appsfire and AppAware.

Previously, StumbleUpon was simply using trending data to find hot videos to take your through. But now they’ve integrated their social recommendation engine into the mix to make the entire experience more personalized. In other words, you’ll now be taken to videos liked by people you’re connected with on the service.

And with this as well as the addition of videos from TED and Hulu, the company hopes the experience becomes more than just watching the latest viral videos on YouTube. In fact, Camp talks about this as being more of a “social TV” experience and “a good alternative to television surfing”.

Of course, right now, this is all still confined to the browser, but Camp does envision a future where they bring this social video browsing experience into the living room. The key to that, he says, is making sure all the content is in HD. In the web browser, that doesn’t matter so much, in the living room, it does.

StumbleUpon plus Hulu is particularly interesting here because it is a bit like traditional television surfing. You can stumble through episodes of shows that your friends like. And if you find one you like, you can stay there and watch it. I asked if they were worried that Hulu might not like this usage (Hulu is notorious for blocking unauthorized access), but Camp said he’s sure they’ll be fine with this, because it’s just about finding what you want to watch on Hulu then watching it the same way, ads and all.

Camp also notes that they’ve added a lot of Vimeo content into the mix recently. And says that while there aren’t currently any Facebook videos, it’s something they may think about in the future — but it’s tricky because of the privacy issues and API access needed.

As for other large videos site, Camp says they’re looking at them all. Pretty much anyone using embeddable Flash can be easily added at any point, he says.

Created by UCSC student Suchit Agarwal and Blippy engineer Rahul Thathoo, what’s awesome about Tumbl.in is the same thing that drives StumbleUpon, the delight in finding something random in through a link you wouldn’t have clicked on otherwise (see what I found second image below). What sets it apart is the Twitter social graph curation and the ability to toggle through lists.

In the same space as Friendshuffle and Tweetbeat, pages you Tumbl are served up by frequency (the amount of times someone in your stream has tweeted a link) and recency. And, in case you don’t like random, you can also browse things you’ve favorited on Twitter, turning the service into a Twitter specific Instapaper.

Says Agarwal, “The idea is to get completely out of the way of a user and create a non-intrusive browsing experience while providing the user enough context (show them the tweet, for example).”

Tumblin will soon (tonight even) be releasing a functionality to Tumbl links according to user interests, by crawling through the curated links shared by “Suggested Users on various topics, therefore aggregating Twitter by vertical expertise. Agarwal and Thathoo are working on other forms of Tumb.lin personalization as well as different visualizations for different media (videos for example).

An iPad app is in the pipeline, which I’m thinking might along the same concept lines as Flipboard or Pulse but specifically for Twitter. Also: It’s probably not a bad idea for someone like StumbleUpon, Digg or even Twitter itself to buy this.

If you’ve ever used StumbleUpon, you’ll be familiar with how to use this app. At the most basic level, you simple sign in, hit the “Start Stumbling” button, and off you go. Content starts loading and depending on if you like it or don’t like it, you give it a thumbs up or thumbs down on the top toolbar. Or you can choose not to rate it at all and hit the “SU” button to go to the next site.

With the click of a bottom you can also share any page via email, Twitter, or Facebook. Or you can share it with another Stumbler. You can also see info about each page including how many views it has, who liked it, and read reviews about it.

But there’s also a way to use the app that’s perfect for the small screens of the iPhone and Android phones. Right below the Start Stumbling button is a “Best for mobile stumbling” area. Here you’ll find links to “Photos,” “News,” “Flickr,” and “YouTube” that will show you only that type of content. Obviously, each of these is great for browsing quickly on a mobile device.

Below that “Best for” area, there’s also a list of your topics (the areas you’ve indicated you’re interested in on StumbleUpon) so you can stumble that way as well.

You can find the app in the App Store here. Or you can search for it in the Android Market. It’s a free download.

Discovery engine startup StumbleUpon today announced it has hired two new directors to expand its sales and partnership teams, both previous Google employees.

Anthony Napolitano, a former key member of the sales teams for several of Google’s products, including TV Ads, Analytics, Checkout and AdWords, will be joining the company as Director of Sales.

Oliver Hsiang, until recently manager of strategic partner development at Google and former product manager at Yahoo, Microsoft and Chipshot, is StumbleUpon’s new Director of Strategic Partnerships.

In a press release, StumbleUpon founder and CEO Garrett Camp boasts about the double steal from Google and says the company has hired 15 new team members in the last three months alone.

Looks like StumbleUpon is faring well after about a year after its spin-off from eBay – the ‘social search engine’ company recently also reached 10 million registered users.

Without making a lot of noise about it, StumbleUpon yesterday surpassed 10 million registered users. The milestone was reached upon registration of a user that goes by the name Nellzom, a 20-year old from Colombia.

So how do we know he’s mr. diez milliones?

Because a StumbleUpon community development and support employee stumbled his profile and added the words “Nellzom is officially our 10th Million user! Welcome to StumbleUpon and its beautiful community of users!”.

Thanks to our eagle-eyed reader Paul Sanchez for uhm, stumbling upon it.

Last time we covered the size of StumbleUpon’s user base was in April 2008, when it hit 5 million users and nearly five billion stumbles. It took them another 2 years to double their number of users, but of course there’s no telling how many registered users are still active on the service. Nevertheless, according to StatCounter, StumbleUpon drives more traffic to websites than Twitter, Reddit or Digg, so they must be doing something right.

For your reference: it’s been a little over a year since StumbleUpon spun off from eBay and became an independent startup again.

As the company pointed out in a recent blog post, they have since then released the web bar as well as a new version of the flagship Mozilla add-on, its URL shortener and content syndication service su.pr, a Chrome extension, a revamped ads system, a new look to their site, an iPad app, new badges, and more. In other words, they’ve been busy.

In the blog post, dated May 4, the company also shared some interesting stats:

- 118% growth rate in active users since 2009
- 5.4 billion recommendations since April 2009
- In March 2010 alone, half a billion recommendations
- StumbleUpon users stumble links 25 times a day on average
- Users of the Mozilla add-on stumble something 400 times a month on average
- Over 100,000 Facebook fans

The company can now add 10 million users to that list.

Are you one of them? Why (not)?

According to StatCounter’s GlobalStats research arm, Twitter now generates almost 10% of social media driven global hits to websites, while Facebook still reigns supreme as the primary source of traffic to global websites with almost half (48%) of ‘Social Media hits’.

Surprisingly, the number two social media traffic generator is not Twitter, but StumbleUpon with almost a quarter (25%). Furthermore, StatCounter claims StumbleUpon was number one ahead of Facebook in the US last month, in terms of traffic generation.

The data for March 2010 is said to be based on 13 billion page views across the global StatCounter network of member sites. The company only recently added social media services to its GlobalStats tool, and notes that its market share appears to fluctuate way more than browser or search statistics.

As you can tell from the graph above (larger version here), Facebook peaked around in the holiday period at the end of the year and is actually losing share fast, although still dominant with roughly half of social media traffic coming from the social network. StumbleUpon and Twitter have enjoyed a similar growth curve since the end of last year, although the former’s growth is clearly accelerating faster in comparison to Twitter.

StumbleUpon’s large share is surprising because it usually flies under the radar when it comes to traffic generation from social services on the Web. Perhaps it owes its high rank to the fact that its main reason of being is having users discover third-party websites, while Twitter and Facebook are not only about sharing links but also status, location and activity updates as well as media like photos and videos.

Then again, Digg didn’t even make it to the top 5 in StatCounter’s research.

Update: commenters have suggested that StatCounter is under-counting Twitter’s share because of the plethora of third-party clients out there. We’re well aware of this and have requested StatCounter to clarify how they measure referring sites – so far we haven’t heard back.

The top Social Media sites to generate global website traffic after Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter are YouTube (6%), reddit (4%), Digg (2%) and MySpace (2%). LinkedIn was ranked at 12 out of 25 monitored services with 0.34%, while Google Buzz was not yet included in the research.

On a sidenote: in June 2009, we posted a statistical breakdown of where our traffic comes from (not limited to social media sites).

Google launched a new service today in from its Labs called Google Reader Play. It is a more visual way to browse through the most popular items being saved and shared on Google Reader. When you launch it, you are presented with a large photo, video, or text excerpt on the main part of the screen, and can flip through by clicking on arrows or selecting an item from the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen.

Google Reader Play doesn’t require you to sign in, but if you do then you can star, share, and like items, and it starts to recommend things to you based on what your friends share, star, and like in Google Reader. The user interface seems to borrow a lot from StumbleUpon, with its concept of randomly flicking through the best stuff on the Web. In particular, it’s very similar to StumbleVideo, except it includes more than just videos. It is very image-heavy. The user interface reminds me of some elements of enjosythin.gs as well in the way that it presents images and text excerpts in a blown-up manner. The arrows are very Fast Flip, another Labs experiment for the Google News in making magazine and newspaper articles more visually browsable.

Like many of its other recent efforts, especially with Buzz, Google Reader Play is an attempt to encourage more direct sharing and to capture that sharing data. More and more Website referral traffic is coming from sharing service such as Twitter and Facebook. Google wants to be in the sharing game as well.

Problem was, the startup says, since users generally couldn’t play the music on their site and were constantly being directed to third-party websites and apps for streaming, people never really got that FriendFeed experience that would compel them to come back.

The Dutch company figured they needed to do something else, and the result of their overhauled strategy will be going live in alpha mode this morning. The short version: it’s Delicious-type bookmarking meets StumbleUpon-type discovery for online music.

Essentially, Twones will now focus on what it refers to as the “Music Bar”, a browser add-on / bookmarklet that lets users bookmark music that is being streamed on other websites or MP3 blogs and discover music others have bookmarked in a fun way. The Music Bar will debut as a Firefox extension, but Chrome and Internet Explorer versions are near completion, I’m told.

When installed, you can use Twones to bookmark music on thousands of supported websites, manage your virtual collection in a sidebar that looks a lot like Delicious, and share music with others in Twones or on services like Twitter and Facebook. In addition, any music you stream can be scrobbled to Last.fm so you can keep track of it there.

Finally, there’s an ‘Explore’ button that basically lets people jump to any random track that is in Twones’ database – no need to install the Music Bar even for that. This can be a great way to discover new music, but arguably there is a need for some kind of controller that lets you explore tracks within a certain genre, at least.

The problem with Twones is that, since it revolves almost entirely around music that’s being shared online elsewhere, you’re never quite sure if the songs you’re so carefully bookmarking are going to be there tomorrow, because the source could be gone for whatever reason. The startup says it’s working on ways to downsize that issue.

Twones aims to make money from advertising, affiliate revenues, maybe a premium version down the line, and/or as an analytics service for online music sharing (kind of what Bit.ly does for general links today). They haven’t really figured out which path to take right now, but the startup says the $500k seed funding it raised earlier is enough to buy them time to do so, as they are very ‘cost efficient’ in the sense that there’s no need to store a gigantic amount of music on their servers, seal license deals or run a complex content distribution network.

All in all, I could see myself using Twones for sure, but it feels more like a feature than a solid business to me. We’ll see if the next iterations of the service will make me change my mind.

After all, this visa is about creating American jobs and moving innovation here which would otherwise happen in other countries. We can boost the economy without any cost to taxpayers. It’s not about admitting H-1B visa holders who sometimes make Americans compete for high-paying jobs, but bringing in entrepreneurs who expand the pie for everyone. Not only do the Democrats support this, but so do the Republicans (their thought leader, Newt Gingrich blogged about my previous TechCrunch post on immigration and his staff told me that he was a supporter of the startup visa). So this seems like a no-brainer.

But, no, logic doesn’t prevail with this crowd. I got the same stream of hate mail that I’m used to, and the xenophobes hijacked the BusinessWeek reader feedback section again. Most of their statements are illogical and uneducated. But there are two potentially meaningful arguments which opponents of the startup visa make, which are worth discussing: that the founders we are bringing in aren’t always the “best and brightest” and that there is already a visa category for geniuses called the O-1 visa.

I know we’re not always bringing in the best and brightest. Most are just average techies. I can offer myself up as an example. When I came to this country in 1980 from Australia, I was just a low-level computer programmer. Yes, I took pride in being able to write the slickest Assembler code (anyone remember what this is?). But I was pretty average in my education and skills. I had no PhD. I had no patents. No one would ever have thought of giving me an O-1 visa. But I came, I worked hard, and I learned. And I developed ideas for how to make better software.

Years later, technology which I invented formed the basis of a software company which employed over 1,000 people and changed the way enterprise client-server systems were built. I don’t know my total value-add to the American economy but I certainly added hundreds of millions of dollars over the life of my two startups. And now I’m giving back to America by contributing my time and energy to 3 great universities, Duke, Harvard and UC-Berkeley.

Now let’s discuss the genius visa. Any immigration attorney will tell you that qualifying for this visa is so hard that even Einstein wouldn’t have cut it.  You’ve got to have a perfect academic record, have topped every class you took and have as many as 10 independent authorities say you walk on water. I happened to meet someone at a talk I gave at Berkeley last week, who qualified for this. He has a remarkable story which shows how screwed up our immigration system is.

Alex Kosorukoff learned programming in high school in Russia and started working part-time as a software developer. He later joined Ivanovo State Power University and worked part-time as a researcher in a Russian-American joint venture.  He came across several American books on entrepreneurship, read them, and started thinking about becoming an entrepreneur.

Alex persuaded two friends to start a company in 1991. (Let me remind you that this was very, very early in the transition in Russia from Communism to Democracy). They built accounting software which became a big hit. Alex rode the rising tide of entrepreneurship and launched several other companies. In 1995, he won a U.S. Information Agency “Business for Russia” contest. Part of the prize was an exchange program at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School. He came to the U.S. for 2 months, learned more about American business and went back home to solve some of our problems. (Like nearly all foreigners who come here, he fell in love with America and wanted to share the American Dream).

Alex started researching why organizations struggle to scale well, why decision processes become more inefficient and why talented employees leave. Alex looked around at the natural world and noticed that biological organisms do a better job of scaling up. He designed a form of participatory organization based on evolutionary algorithms and prototyped it with a website that attracted hundreds of participants in 1998-99. His research was discovered by Prof. David Goldberg (University of Illinois), who invited the young Russian to join his lab.  Dr. Goldberg’s lab was amongst the top in the field of evolutionary computation.

Alex expected he would have the best of both worlds by coming to America—performing groundbreaking research and becoming an American-style entrepreneur. Once he got to Illinois, however, Alex realized that neither his academic research aspirations nor his entrepreneurial ambitions would be completely fulfilled.  The university told Alex that he could not work outside the strict classification of his visa, could perform no side work, and definitely could not launch a company. “They even told me I couldn’t continue to run my website, since it had ad-generated income. I had to move it to Taiwan and have a friend over there run it for me,” Alex explains.

Since the focus of his research was forming companies using evolutionary computation, Alex realized he would not be able to take his theorems and try them out in the real world, as he had done in Russia. “I had to postpone all my entrepreneurial activities and resort to simulation and doing related evolutionary computation research for other professors, but that meant a big switch away from my main area of interest,” says Alex. Still, he managed to win a number of awards for his research.

In fact, Alex’s work did manage to stimulate entrepreneurial activity. Garrett Camp, who founded Stumbleupon, read Alex’s work and used parts of it in conceiving a social sharing company which ultimately sold to EBay for $75 million. If you take Camp at his word, Alex may have been modest in telling me this story. Says Camp, “Alex pioneered the concept of human-based computation. His work on human-based genetic algorithms provided a lot of insight during the design of StumbleUpon, and I referenced several of his papers in my Masters thesis”.

After Alex finished his Ph.D., he got an offer from StumbleUpon (ironically, a company that was founded in Canada in 2001 and later relocated to Silicon Valley). StumbleUpon uses human-based evolutionary computation techniques as does Wikipedia. Alex was clearly grateful for the offer. But it’s pretty easy to tell that he is itching to start his own company, something he’s done successfully several times before in Russia in what might be considered a far harsher business environment. So what’s he doing right now? Waiting for his green card to be approved.

In the meantime, the unemployment rate in California is now over 12%, a near record high. The national rate is at 10%. Credit markets are totally frozen and small businesses—the most dynamic part of the U.S. economy are suffocating for lack of operating capital. So slightly tweaking a law to allow smart foreigners to jumpstart our economy would seem to be a really easy decision politically and economically. Rather than listening to the emotion of misguided anti-immigrants, we need to listen to reason. After all, it is immigrants like Alex who have started 52% of Silicon Valley’s tech companies in recent times.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Ever since StumbleUpon spun itself off from eBay last April, it’s been reinventing itself at a rapid pace. In June, it launched Su.pr, its own URL shortening service, but that was just an interesting new product. Today, it is starting to roll out a major redesign that recasts the service as a social search engine “somewhere between a Twitter and Google,” says founder Garrett Camp.

About 8 million people a month use StumbleUpon, says Camp, to bookmark and share the best sites on the Web. More than 35 million Web pages have been stumbled, and now the company has indexed them all to make them more searchable. The homepage has also been simplified to show you a stream of pages recently stumbled by people you know. New StumbleUpon users will see the redesign immediately, while existing users can switch by clicking here.

Traditionally, people went to StumbleUpon to randomly flip through interesting pages, but now it works more like a proper search engine. Except that it only returns pages already deemed to be worthy by the StumbleUpon community, and then within those results it shows you the pages that only people you subscribe to have Stumbled, rated, or reviewed. In that sense, it is like Yahoo’s now-defunct MyWeb experiment (but with actual users).

You can sort results by everyone, just your friends, or just your own Stumbles. And the new Discover tab lets you sort by most recent stumbles from your friends, top rated stumbles, most shared, or by topic. “It is halfway between search and discovery,” says Camp. “It is not as comprehensive as Google and not as realtime as Twitter.” The idea, rather, is to add a social layer to search without all the noise you get on Twitter.

StumbleUpon will also be releasing a new version of its toolbar later this week, which will add these social search features, as well as the ability to share links on Facebook and Twitter (using a Su.pr URL). Also the toolbar, like before, shows a little StumbleUpon icon on Google search results next to links that have been Stumbled. But it will support new sites including, Bing, CNN.com, Yahoo News, and the New York Times.

What is it with all the toolbar copycat craziness lately. First, there was Digg going after StumbleUpon with the Diggbar. Then StumbleUpon, which already had a toolbar, introduced a new toolbar/URL shortening service called Su.pr.

Now, micro-blogging service Tumblr is getting in on the act with its own toolbar which it is calling TumbleUpon. Could they try to be more blatant in ripping off StumbleUpon? The toolbar has a random Stumble-like shuffle button which randomly takes you through different Tumblogs in a similar way that StumbleUpon’s toolbars do. On the right there is a heart button if you want to “like” a page, a reblog button and a button that takes you to your own Tumblr dashboard.

StumbleUpon’s Su.pr toolbar, in comparison, also has a random shuffle button for discovering pages Websites other people have Stumbled, and a “like” button. But Su.pr is a URL shortener with powerful analytics on the backend, while TumbleUpon is not. It is just a discovery tool which surfaces other Tumblogs of people who have overlapping “likes.”

So is this a joke? Yes, and no. Tumblr founder David Karp tells us:

It was really an experiment to see how a tool like StumbleUpon would work for Tumblr content. Based on the feedback, it seems to be doing a pretty good job. We really like that it’s the first Tumblr discovery tool that shows off all of the pretty user created themes while exploring content. . . .

We might wind up changing the name when we start promoting it in the Dashboard

In a blog post today, Karp also shares some growth stats. He claims that in July, 2009, Tumblr had 50 million visitors, 255 million impressions, 650,000 new posts per day, and 5,000 new users per day.

Tumblr is definitely growing, but comScore estimates a much smaller number of users: only 3.9 million uniques worldwide in June, 2009 and 68 million pageviews. That is a 3X increase in unique visitors over a year ago and a 12X increase in pageviews, but a far cry from the numbers Karp is putting out.

I asked Karp what could explain this disparity. He pointed out that 15 percent of Tumblr’s blogs are on custom domains, and that the 50 million number is for visitors per Google Analytics. The same person can be a visitor more than once. Google counts 20 million unique visitors, and Quantcast counts 13 million worldwide. The site is verified by Quantcast, so I’d go with that number. Any way you count it, though, the service is showing strong growth.

But really, TumbleUpon?