This application provides a system for discovering, saving, sharing and ranking websites, with the beautiful element of randomness thrown in. I’ve recently started to stumble with a co-workers. We send each other sites using the browser tool bar, and subscribe to each other’s “sites I liked” RSS feeds.

The first time I read about this kind of random web surfing was in Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think”. He wrote about a site called eTour. Before their demise in the dot com bubble, this startup had a similar theme of random web surfing. By clicking the “Next Site” button you would be whisked away to another site that fell into one of your checked off categories of interest.

This concept held zero interest for me because I imagined it would mean randomly wading through all the horrible content on the web. But when I gave StumbleUpon a whirl I found quite the opposite. Because of the thumbs up thumbs down rating system, only well designed and extremely interesting sites end up in the rotation, making (almost) every stumble a surprising and/or exciting experience.

I ended up downloading and keeping the tool bar and I use it almost every day. I stumble when I’m bored, I stumble for inspiration, and I stumble late at night when I would be better off sleeping…