Stop stumbling and Fast Forward to get the real buzz

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Brian and team, who work for a digital marketing agency run this Digital Crosstalk blog.
Occasionally we might blog about companies and people we work with but for the most part we'll simply be blogging about stories and events which we find interesting.

27th
NOV

Stop stumbling and Fast Forward to get the real buzz

Posted by Brian | Filed under blogging

Source: TechCrunch

This week I stumbled across, but sadly not upon, a new start up which may one day become a worthy opponent to Stumbleupon. The new start up is a simple Firefox button add-on that takes you to a new page, based on the most visited next page of all the users with the “Fast Forward” add on.

First of all for those not in the loop, what is Stumbleupon? Stumbleupon is an incredibly entertaining way of surfing the net by means of ’stumbling’ upon sites. The Stumbleupon algorithm allows you to select the kind of sites you normally visit and from there builds an individual profile of what kind of sites it should recommend to you based on the sites you to choose to give the thumbs up/down to or ignore, as well as comparing your Stumble profile to users who have similar stumbling patterns to you.

The main difference between Stumbleupon and Fast Forward is that Fast Forward takes you to a page reasonably relevant to the one you are already on. According to creators Buzzbox, most of the time surfers find a new page by following a link on that page so the next page tends to have a certain relevancy to the page you are already looking at.

Buzzbox’s website describes the process as ‘It’s like Amazon shopping recommendations for webpages, just like “People who bought this also bought these items”. We do “People who viewed this page also viewed this page next”.’

What I like about Stumbleupon is that it often finds me very small sites that I would never find myself through the search engines and probably wouldn’t even search for. On the downside, it can be a bit of a distraction. While Fast Forward will tend to keep you on the same topic for longer and so prove more useful, it does have the abiltity to redirect you to non-relevant pages that hundreds of people have found interesting, and so could prove to be an even bigger distraction in the future.

According to Buzzbox’s website there are “over 200,000 people contributing and over 40,000 websites in our system.” Neverthless, the total number of downloads of the add-on has been relatively small and so they are still a very small self-funded start up but it will be interesting to see how well this web service does.