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Stumble Upon is a fabulous, amazing, genius concept. It’s better than Digg.com, better than del.icio.us, better than all of them. Stumble Upon has been very good to my podcast, Nobody’s Listening. We’ve had a lot of visits from people stumbling around the web… but I recently uninstalled the toolbar and submitted my account to be deleted.

I did it for a number of reasons.

I allowed Stumble Upon to distract me. I do not blame the service. The service does exactly what it offers. I apparently do not have the self-discipline necessary to not click that flippin’ button. I would try to control myself by hiding the toolbar but that only worked for a while.

That button became addictive. It’s easy to be distracted when you’re working, mostly because you’d rather not be. But when you find yourself clicking that button when you’d rather be checking your favorite forums, playing a game or working on blog posts… you know you’ve got a problem. Even while surfing the internet, if my gmail was loading to slowly, I’d open a new tab and start clicking away. Than a half an hour later I’d remember to go back to my inbox. It was ridiculous.

The Adult Content filter doesn’t work well enough. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m pretty darned picky about what I put into my head via my eyes and ears. Though 90% of the time Stumble Upon shows me stuff I love to see, the other 10% is what sealed the deletion deal for me. I don’t want to see naked people. I don’t want to see a turd in someone’s MySpace picture. I don’t want to read your potty-mouthed web comic. Nor do I want to see another filthy parody of a motivational poster. It’s not always images either. Stories or jokes that discuss sex acts are not what I signed up for. I didn’t check the box for ‘pee-pee humor’ in my profile.

You can’t control what you’re going to see next. Maybe it’s just me. I’m prepared to accept that. But as for me and my browser… we’ll be moving over to digg.com or something. Not because the stories and images are any cleaner, but because I get a title and an excerpt that allows me to make informed choice before I click. It’s been said that you can’t un-see something. Truer words were never said. The magic of Stumbled Upon is that it is random and you never know what you’ll see next. This is also Stumled Upon’s biggest flaw. I would suggest that they consider incorporating some kind of preview of what’s coming next, as an option at least. Tetris did it years ago.

So am I bitter? Nope. Am I casting judgment on those who have SU? Not a bit. I love the concept of SU, but in practice I’ve found that it’s just not for me. Join me if you want… and we will rule this galaxy as father and son.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Internet Fun, Real Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.