>Sixteen years ago, we started StumbleUpon to help people discover new webpages. The idea was simple: click a button to find a cool webpage. It was easy and fun. Over the years SU has delivered personalized content to over 40 million users, serving up nearly 60 billion stumbles. StumbleUpon pioneered content discovery on the web, before the concepts of the “like button”, “news feed” or “social media” were mainstream.
>Since starting SU the number of people with internet access has grown nearly 10x, and mobile phones and social media have changed our lives. The number of platforms to share or host content has increased significantly, yet we still need better tools to help us filter through the exploding amount of content on the web, and find signal within the noise. And we’ve learned from SU that while simplicity and serendipity is important, so is enabling contextual curation (ie. “cool space photos”) instead of just clicking “I like it”.
>Recently Expa has been focused on creating a new discovery platform, which incorporates all of the lessons learned from StumbleUpon to take content discovery to the next level. Mix.com combines social and semantic personalization into one streamlined experience. It also makes it easier for people to organize content into meaningful collections. This will help you find obscure but interesting content that has been recommended by people you know and trust.
>After careful consideration, we’ve made the decision to focus fully on building Mix and transition StumbleUpon accounts into Mix.com over the next couple months. We have built Mix to work on every browser and smartphone, to make the transition as smooth as possible. With a few clicks you can register and import your SU favorites, interests and tags --- creating Mix Collections that are easily shared with friends. If you have any questions, email support[at]mix.com for help.
>Creating StumbleUpon has been an amazing experience. It was the first project I worked on back in college in 2002. I have personally clicked the stumble button hundreds of thousands of times, and learned a lot in the process. But it’s now time to focus on the future, and create the next discovery platform that will uncover hidden gems we would never think to search for.
>Thank you to the 40 million people who have used SU over the years… you’ve gotten us to where we are today and laid the groundwork for Mix’s approach to curation & discovery. We are excited for you to give Mix a try :)
>-GC [Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbleUpon and later Uber]
https://medium.com/@gc/su-is-moving-to-mix-c2c3bff037a5
http://archive.li/d4h8V
<founded in 2002 in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble
<facing heavy competition from digg and then leddit, SU was acquired by eBay in 2007 only to give it up two years later
<finally killed by kikebook and twatter