StumbleUpon Needs Some Nerdy Improvements

I love StumbleUpon. It is a great way to find new and interesting things to read and look at on the internet.

As a blog (or two) owner, I love the traffic that it can bring when one of my stories gets a couple thumbs up.

One of the great things about StumbleUpon is you get to contribute to a social network type of site without ever really visiting the actual site. Almost all StumbleUpon interaction works through their toolbar that you add to the browser.

However, part of what makes StumbleUpon work is finding other people that like similar things so you can follow the articles that they like. That is where StumbleUpon needs a bit of a nerdy makeover.

They give you the normal options of filtering out people by gender, age, and even city, state, zip. I don’t really understand any of those options. I’m trying to find people that like certain things. I don’t care how old, where they live, or which bathroom they use at the mall.

I do care that they actually use the site.

I want to be able to filter out people that haven’t been active in X number of days. For me, it would probably be 7 or 14 days.

I would also like to find people that have actually voted for a story in X days.

I do care that they are not already one of my friends.

People that are already friends of mine don’t really need to show up in the search results. If I am searching for people, I am trying to make new friends.

I can’t imagine either of these options taking any real amount of work. All of the data is already there and displayed on various screens. They could probably make the changes in a day and not even need to bother their real programming nerds.