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For the person who wants to wander aimlessly through a bunch of sites generally related to his interests, StumbleUpon is great. Pick you topic and start Stumbling. Great way to expand your horizons on the variety of sites under a general topic. I consider it mainly an automated brainstorming session. Of use many times.
Of course, searching through Google or other “modern” search engines, the results you find can be so off compared to what you were actually looking for that you think you were Stumbling.
Yoono, which at first I thought could be a clone, is actually a different animal. The firefox extension suggests sites related to the one you are browsing based on the groupings of other user’s bookmarks. I find this a great tool for brainstorming and lateral thinking when you already think you know everything you need to know about a topic. Because the Yoono toolbar says “wrong”. I installed it and tested it out just to see and already have found sites of use.
Hanging out at the same two or three forums can give you tunnel vision, when there is much more happening in a forum you have never heard of, because you were comfortable with what you were used to. I found out about wickedfire.com through Yoono. There’s some great info to be had there and I would have never found it without Yoono.
So I thought I’d write this like bit about it. Besides I wasted many hours at StumbleUpon, although it resulted in the love of my life. But now that I have her, Stumbling is getting a little old. I don’t want to click 53 times to get to what I was looking for, just to get sidetracked into another subject, end up in a forum in a flame war with an idiot, and remember, right before I lay my head my head down at 2:00 in the morning, what I was searching for in the first place.
Much better to be actively looking for something specific, not quite getting the search terms correctly, looking up to the toolbar for suggestions and finding exactly what you were looking for or close.
