SheGeeks

A few days ago while doing some cleanup on my StumbleUpon profile, I opted in for StumbleUpon to email me recommendations. StumbleUpon is great for finding articles, sites, and all sorts of neat things across the web. However, I’m getting to a point where I submit content to StumbleUpon for others to discover, but I don’t have enough time to see what others in the community are stumbling. Since I use the service often and find value in it, I opted into being emailed recommendations.
   

Today, I received my first StumbleUpon recommendation email. The email consisted of about 4 rows of recommended sites and 2 rows of the popular sites of the week on StumbleUpon. While visually appealing, overall I was disappointed in what I received.
   

Make It Easy For Me

Above is a screenshot of the email I received. Quite frankly, there’s entirely too much information missing for me to even want to look at another email like this. I can’t see the value of this email and I’m itching to unsubscribe. So how can StumbleUpon improve it? Here are 4 suggestions:
         

Improve Amount of Site Information – What’s the name of the site? What categories has it been tagged under? Other than a screenshot or image from the site and some text there’s not much to go off that would motivate me to click-through to any of the recommended sites. The Download Squad is the only recommended site I thought to visit because I’m already familiar with the work of the good folks over at DS. I have no idea what those other sites are about or if they’re even trustworthy. Sorry, the headline titles at the bottom of each thumbnail just isn’t enough information for me.
    

Display Content Reviews – Where are the reviews of the sites that StumbleUpon is recommending? While I’m more than happy to make up my own mind, I’d love to see what others have said about certain sites or how many people recommended/stumbled a site without leaving my inbox. This helps me to quickly figure out whether a recommendation is revelant based on community ratings and reviews.

Show Related Stumbles - What sites have I stumbled that led to the recommendations I’m receiving? I have no idea where StumbleUpon is getting their recommendations from and none of them are fitting the sites my interests. Now I’m left wondering where these recommendations are coming from. Are they from site’s I’ve stumbled? My network of friends? The bogey man?

Recommend Content From StumbleUpon Friends – Are my friends stumbling these recommended sites? If not, StumbleUpon would be wise to recommend some of the articles my friends are stumbling. StumbleUpon has always seemed a bit like a one-man’s game to me. Pulling my friend’s stumbles into the mix not only adds value to the content because it’s from a trusted group of people, but it also helps me to interact with my friends outside of that toolbar.

Missing Value

These features and enhancements to the emails could help increase my activity and interaction on StumbleUpon, while adding a little more value to the service.  For now, I’d rather stick with the StumbleUpon toolbar. The email will only keep me in my inbox longer than I want to be. It requires too much work on my part to quickly find the most value in the recommended sites , which should be the goal of the email.

Nevertheless, I do hope to see the emails improve because they could be a quick source of good information for bloggers and those that don’t have the time to stumble through the entire web.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Last week Twitter implemented a limit on the number of people you’re allowed to follow. I’ve seen numerous numbers, but the common limit seems to be 2k users. While the limit is a work in progress, that’s a lot of (hopefully) great conversation to go around. However, for major players in the web game, or those who are rapidly approaching the 2k follower limit, will this cause you to switch services?

Helping Out: Tips On Staying Below Twitter’s Limits

To help myself not go over the limit, if I’m subscribing to anyone’s blog updates via Twitter, I’ll now subscribe to their RSS feed or grab the RSS feed for their Twitter accounts. It would help a ton if the services that I subscribe to posts more of their updates via the service’s blog rather than on Twitter.

Otherwise, there’s nothing more to do except to stop following those that really don’t contribute to the information that I’d like to see in my Twitter stream.

Not The Way To Go: Limit The New, Not The Old

While it’s nice to see that Twitter is doing their best to handle the spam problem that’s beginning to get out of control, limits on the number of people you can and can’t follow can’t be the solution for all current accounts. It would be better to impose these limits on new accounts that are being created.

On another note, since I’m not at 2k this won’t cause me to switch from Twitter. However, it’s very likely that if I ever reach the limit, there would be a ton of conflicting opinions to have about Twitter. You’ve basically stalled the growth of your own personal circle of connections. In turn, you’re wondering if anyone important has stopped or decided not to follow you just because of the limit. That’s not something you should have to worry about with any service.

What are your thoughts on the limit? If you’re over 2k, what will you do? If you’re under 2k is this posing any kind of problems for you?

Scaling Web 2.0 Is A Serious Problem

The limit also poses some interesting thoughts on Web 2.0 services, especially social media related services. There’s a serious scaling problem going on these days. First Facebook limits the number of friends you can have, and now Twitter limits your followings. While Twitter blames the limits on spammers, which I’m not saying isn’t true, they also have a scaling problem and this limit will help out with that a ton!

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• Long-time web personalities move to Friendfeed and Identi.ca
• Twitter Limits to 2000 Follows. Could They Charge To Lift The Limit?

Popularity: 6% [?]