Now you can Stumble outside of the shadow of the mega-corporate overlords at eBay - two years after Stumble founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith cashed out and handed their baby over to the ecommerce giant, they've come back with a team of investors and bought StumbleUpon back from eBay. It's pretty exciting.
This change will help StumbleUpon move quickly and stay true to its focus - helping people discover interesting web content. The goal is to make StumbleUpon the web’s largest recommendation engine and we think this is the best way to get us there.
Earlier this year StumbleUpon hits 7 million registered users, which was at the time 50% higher than most estimates of Twitter's users. Twitter and Stumble are like Apples and Oranges. Both, though, are tools of discovery, sharing and social connection. They are different in some ways but similar in others. There's a special kind of magic to StumbleUpon, though, and we're very glad to see its founders back in the driver's seat.
Remember what the last wildly innovative thing StumbleUpon did was? Adding the awesome video section of the site, we'd argue, six months before the eBay acquisition. Now that Camp and Smith are in charge again, we hope to see the same spirit of awesomeness that built Stumble in charge again. The team already says they've got "several new products and features to be released in the upcoming months."
"StumbleUpon is one of the handful of services launched on the consumer web in the last few years that can truly be said to have significant cognitive benefits for the people who use it. Give yourself an evening to peruse and explore the web using Stumble, if you haven't. It makes the brain feel good and it's a great way to learn - through play and personalization. It's a whole lot of fun. It's not something that needed to be turned into a way to jump from eBay listing to eBay listing. Stumble is smart, it's useful and we're very happy to see it independent again." say's MARSHALL KIRKPATRICK , ReadWriteWeb
This is good. This will allow the company to focus on making StumbleUpon even better, since the owners are now once again, in the business of StumbleUpon. This of course is in contrast to being in the business of eBay.
