In order to simplify their users lives, YouTube recently introduced a new feature known as YouTube Leanback. As the name obviously suggests, this feature allows users to lean back and enjoy videos with a minimal amount of maneuvering.

YouTube Leanback

To use this facility, users will initially have to feed in certain details, like settings and preferences. They also have to feed 8in the required content, from the subscriptions. They can also access videos which their friends are sharing on Facebook if their YouTube and Facebook accounts are connected.

Once this is done, videos of the user’s interest will start playing as soon as the user opens the site. It is also possible to watch things like news and other entertainment programmes.

To select the required video, the user has to use the scroll keys on the keyboard, thus obliterating the need for the mouse. Each time the user navigates to the button he requires, he has also to click the ‘Enter’ key. The space bar of the keyboard functions as the ‘Pause’ and ‘Play’ key.

Unfortunately, the YouTube Leanback feature does not provide any keys with which to control the volume of the video. For that, one needs to use the controls on the system or the speakers.

Other than that one missing feature, watching videos with the YouTube Leanback feature has become similar to watching TV as one can easily use a wireless keyboard to navigate with. YouTube refers to this as the ’10 foot experience’.

Watching a stream of videos on YouTube Leanback

The most surprising thing about YouTube Leanback is that it eliminates the need for users to search, which goes against all of Google’s business principles!

StumbleUpon has, however, chosen not to make a big hue and cry about it. An employee of the site just stumbled the profile of the new entrant and mentioned that he was their official 10 millionth user. He is a 20 year old male from Colombia, and his user name is Nellzom.

In April 2008 StumbleUpon had registered 5 million users and they have doubled that number in the last two years. In fact, the StumbleUpon blog announced that they had 9,908,350 users just over a fortnight ago, which means they signed up approximately 6,500 new users each day in the past 2 weeks.

Statistics released by the company show that they have seen an 118% growth in the number of active users since 2009 and have delivered 5.4 billion recommendations since April 2009, half a billion of which were in March 2010.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay in 2007 for $75 million but separated from eBay in the last year. The company is now faring pretty well in its recently re-acquired start-up status.

According to reports published last month, StumbleUpon drove more traffic to third-party websites than many of the other more popular sites such as Twitter, Reddit and Digg.

An average StumbleUpon user stumbles about 25 times a day. Users of the StumbleUpon add-on for Firefox stumble sites about 400 times a month.

The growing popularity of StumbleUpon can probably be attributed to the fact that it is very easy to operate. Users can discover new sites with just one click and also rate them with a simple thumbs up or a thumbs down with just one more click.

Facebook accounts for nearly half the traffic generated from social networks and other social media sites, contributing to 48% of the total. The next largest referrer is StumbleUpon, which sends 25% of the total social media traffic. Twitter ranks third and accounts for 10% of the traffic sent from social sites.

Top 7 Social Media sites that referred traffic to global websites in Jan – Mar 2010.

StatCounter has arrived at these figures after analysing 13 billion page views from all their member sites. Their CEO, Aodhan Cullen, says, “From a business perspective the findings suggest that there is merit in having a corporate Facebook page or Twitter account.”

Quite surprisingly, StumbleUpon has managed to remain the second largest driver of social media traffic through the last year. In the U.S.A; it was the topmost source of social traffic in March.

YouTube, reddit, Digg and MySpace are next in line, in terms of driving traffic, with 6%, 4%, 2% and 2% contribution to total social media referrals respectively.

However, Cullen warns that the social media market is known to fluctuate quite sharply and during the last Christmas and New Year season, Facebook was not only at the top but accounted for almost 75% of the traffic referrals.

Last year, the top three slots were occupied by StumbleUpon, Facebook and MySpace, in thet order.

Now, with the recent introduction of Annotations and @anywhere by Twitter and the ‘Like’ button by Facebook the situation could change all over again.

Users who StumbleUpon a new page and like it click the thumbs up button on the toolbar to vote for that page. If the page has not been Stumbled previously, a submission box comes up.

Submission to StumbleUpon used to be a bit cumbersome, as users had to enter a title, an optional review, select a topic, provide tags and then indicate whether the site contained adult content.

Now submission to StumbleUpon involves merely clicking on the thumbs up button and then indicating whether or not the web page is suitable for viewing in the office.

Old v New StumbleUpon Discovery Page

A second tab allows users to submit an optional review, similar to the fashion of the old submission interface. As seen in the screenshots above and below, the website now provides all users a count of the number of pages they have helped StumbleUpon discover and share with other users.

Unlike Twitter and Facebook, StumbleUpon seems to thrive on growing stealthily. They recently crossed the 7 million user mark, making them bigger than Twitter at the time. Twitter has, of course, since then sky-rocketed in popularity due to the celebrity obsession with the platform.

The new submission system, though, will definitely prompt more user submissions and therefore help StumbleUpon grow and provide more content to its current and new users.

Digg has now launched a new product called the ‘DiggBar’, which appears at the top of the browser whenever users click on any story on Digg. The DiggBar is portable to any website, making social news sharing much easier, but ways to exploit it are already cropping up.

The quasi-toolbar provides a lot of facilities to make it easier to Digg content. The DiggBar allows users to Digg content directly on a site, instead of having to move back and forth repeatedly, between the destination site and the Digg submission page.

Screenshot of DiggBar above a story on BBC.co.uk.

In order to view the DiggBar, users need to merely type “http://dig.com/” before the webpage address. A short URL will be created for that page and theDiggBar will appear at the top, framing the page.

Users can share interesting stories, via email, Twitter and Facebook, easily through the DiggBar. They can also see the top comment, the latest comment and the most controversial comment posted for the story on Digg, while still on the story page.

The DiggBar also shows the number of Diggs, pageviews for the page, related stories, and other stories from the same site on Digg.

Much like the StumbleUpon bar, the DiggBar includes a ‘Random’ button that brings up a random Digg story for users to browse and rate.

Users of the Twitter desktop application ‘Twhirl’ can expect an update, which will allow them to use Digg as their default short URL service.

While all of this is largely positive news for the once darling of social media, the DiggBar is already being exploited by some. As Michael Gray points out, the DiggBar frames a page and assigns it a Digg.com URL, which can be exploited for SEO benefit by unscrupulous affiliate publishers.

Digg claims to have 36 million unique visitors, making it one of the most popular social news sites. However, StumbleUpon is growing in popularity silently and Twitter, with 6 million users, is generating a lot more publicity off-late and is even being pegged as a serious search destination and a source of real-time news.

Once thought to be the next big thing and a likely acquisition target for Google and Microsoft, Digg is now just another old Web 2.0 era site – it’s not going downhill, but it’s yesterday’s news. All rumours and interest in the site have died down a bit. The new toolbar seems to have finally kicked some life back into Digg.

The new toolbar and associated status bar icon take the functionality of the current Firefox browser add-on, shown below, further. The current toolbar add-on tells users how many Diggs and comments a particular has received. The status bar icon pops up notifications of popular stories and related stories on the site.

Digg Firefox Add-On

The current version of the toolbar allows users to customise the topics for which they receive recommendations. Clicking the Digg button currently takes users to the Digg site, where they then log in and Digg the story.

Future versions are expected to allow users to Digg stories from the toolbar itself, just like StumbleUpon allows users to vote from the toolbar itself.

Rumours spread last week talked about a new software-free toolbar, pictured below, similar to the one from StumbleUpon, being in the works. The new toolbar has a large orange “random” button in the top corner of the page taking users to random sites, again in the same manner as StumbleUpon does.

StumbleUpon launched their software-free toolbar five months ago and have since reported a substantial growth in the number of its users. Digg surely hopes to be able to do the same.

The toolbar also has a TinyURL-like facility, that is the toolbar can create a shortened URL for each page. These URLs will begin with ‘http://digg.com/ followed by a six character code, which automatically gets used when the page is shared through Twitter or Facebook. This could be a great advantage to Digg as the shortened URL will be created with a single click of the mouse after typing http://digg.com/ in front of the URL.

There is no confirmation yet on when this toolbar will be released for general use.

StumbleUpon helps users discover websites about subjects they are interested in. Users select topics of interest and install the StumbleUpon toolbar in their browsers. Clicking on the ‘Stumble’ button brings up websites that are popular with other users who have the same interests. The user can then vote via the thumbs up or a thumbs down button for that page or can leave the page by hitting the Stumble button again.

Using the StumbleUpon service repeatedly allows the algorithm to profile the user’s likes and areas of interest for future reference, and refer the user to sites that are more likely to be of interest when the user hits the Stumble button again.

StumbleUpon probably gathered a substantial number of new users in the last few months after they added a new feature by which users no longer need to install a special toolbar in the web browser, but can access the service directly through the StumbleUpon.com site.

What is particularly noteworthy and remarkable is that StumbleUpon has achieved so much popularity without promotion of any kind. They don’t seem to rely on a hype-riddled PR machine like Twitter and Digg do, and unlike those two social services, StumbleUpon has a good revenue generation model.

Advertisers can select categories and user profiles they want to target and then direct a lot of traffic to their website via sponsored Stumbles. Advertising on StumbleUpon is similar in many respects to the pay per click ad model, but is in many other ways a truly revolution social ad concept.
It has been estimated that StumbleUpon is making about $10 million a year, unlike Twitter, which is still struggling to identify a revenue model by which it can support itself.

This revenue is likely to make the company profitable and adds to the profits of parent company, eBay, which bought StumbleUpon in April 2007 for $75 million, when Stumble upon had only 2 million users.