StumbleUpon tears down the plug-in wall, lets in the masses

Using the web site discovery service StumbleUpon right now is kind of like driving a hot convertible with the top up. It’s a cool car, and having the top on gives you better performance, but it’s just not quite as sexy. That top is akin to StumbleUpon’s toolbar web browser plug-in, which you currently must use to use the service. But tonight, StumbleUpon is dropping the top and letting the sun in.

The new version of StumbleUpon is all about accessibility — by anyone, anywhere. While it’s not getting rid of the plug-in toolbar entirely, you no longer need it thanks to some clever JavaScript code. This will allow anyone, both registered users and non-registered users alike, to visit the newly revamped StumbleUpon main site and start finding new and interesting content on the web — in any web browser.

If it works anything like the toolbar-driven version of the service — and from the demonstration I got at the StumbleUpon offices today by founder Garrett Camp, it certainly looks like it does — this is going to be a big development for the finding of good content online.

The plug-in was a limiting factor

Since it launched out of Canada in 2002, StumbleUpon’s focus has always been about directing users towards good content. It’s good at doing just that through a tailored process that includes a classification engine, a clustering engine and friend recommendations. I previously outlined how it works here. But all of that required the plug-in toolbar — and that was a barrier to entry for many people. Not only was it limited to users of Firefox and certain versions of Internet Explorer, many users — even those with those browsers — were simply not going to take the time to install a plug-in.

And Camp realized that. “The primary goal is to increase accessibility,” Camp told me with regards to this big evolution in StumbleUpon’s strategy. Right now StumbleUpon has over 6 million users, but the removal of the toolbar barrier could allow for 50 or even 100 million users to gain access to the service, Camp says.

Maybe an unreasonably lofty goal, but StumbleUpon has something very important on its side: Ease of use. The chart above shows the monthly number of searches per unique user across many popular sites on the Internet including Google, Yahoo and the like. You can see that StumbleUpon easily bests all of them by a large margin. That may seem shocking, but it really makes sense. With Google or any other search engine, you have to type in a query and hit “search” to find something. With StumbleUpon, you simply hit the “Stumble” button.

It’d be almost like if everyone just used Google to hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button — but could do so without having to type anything into the query field. Of course, Google doesn’t work that way, but StumbleUpon does because it keeps track of what you like and don’t like. Thanks to web cookies it can still do this without the toolbar now.

But as I said, StumbleUpon has no intention of getting rid of the toolbar plug-in anytime soon. In fact, Camp has a long term strategy with this new phase of the service which he hopes will lead to more people using the plug-in. The thought is that if you get them familiar with the service, users will want more customization that the plug-in can provide. The plug-in also allows for one-click submission of new content, while the web version requires a longer, manual process more along the lines of how you submit something to Digg or most other social news sites.

In an ideal world, StumbleUpon would have a Stumble toolbar built-in to browsers just as many now