Teft’s Blog

I gotta say, I’ve been using StumbleUpon for last three or four days and I’m impressed. I’ve “stumbled upon” more time-eaters than EVER before! But it really makes me think: Why would I come back?! I go to google to find/research info. I go to slashdot for some tech news (and digg). But what would I go to stumbleupon for?

Today, I “stumbled” onto an awesome flash animation using drum programming sounds. It’s called “Drum Machine” and it was created by “tokyoplastic” (as stated on the page). It takes a few minutes to build up, but once it get’s going it’s DAMN cool.

A cool feature in StumbleUpon is the “send to” button. Having that “send to a friend” feature so close and handy (and in the same spot over and over) is beginning to get over used by me! I know I know, your thinking “most sites have a send to a friend feature, whats the deal?” The fact that it’s in the same spot and remebers the past emails is HUGE! It’s all about the little things.

Along with the japanese “Drum Machine” flash, I stumbled on some really cool time wasting pages! I built a face in flash! Found some amazing lightning photography! Watched a stunning guitarist sound like an ensemble of instruments in a new guitar playing technique (at least new to me)! And found a photographers gorgeous portfolio of 4×5 camera work. Oh look! Three hours just went by. Awesome!

I gave this time waster it’s own paragraph! It’s a physics modeling thingy called “Soda Constructor” that lets you play god on this wireframe robot object. It’s WAY cool. Go ahead, play with it! You get controls to model the gravity and “stuff” that interacts with the object. Needless to say, I spend a lot of time on these things (because there fun).

So in the end, why do I use StumbleUpon? Or more importantly, why would I keep using it? Pure social entertainment. I have yet to try out the recommendation features, so I could be missing a huge piece of the pie. But, am I going to “Stumble” onto a key piece of research or website that I’ve been hunting for? Not likely. But, I’ll have a great time “stumbling” onto fun time wasting sites.