Udo's Techblog

After I installed the StumbleUpon Toolbar, something unexpected happened to my Google Reader page. It got a StumbleUpon "See friend reviews" button. Same thing happens at least on Google Search, Wikipedia and Flickr. Now, this is not because they partnered up or anything. Apparently, the toolbar itself rewrites the content of pages I visit to include StumbleUpon gadgets.

A quick search reveals there is even a CNet News puff piece about it. You get a feeling for how much money changed hands in return for editorial advertising when you read passages like

StumbleUpon, a fun Web discovery service, is getting a new feature, SearchReviews, that will take it beyond its historic role of hyperefficient time-waster.

This new feature makes the StumbleUpon social network much more valuable, so StumbleUpon is also making it easier to add friends from your other networks to it: You can import your friend lists from popular online e-mail services, as well as from Facebook.

And yeah, "time-waster" is the new hipness label for software applications.