StumbleUpon: CTRL + F11 To Regain Life

Posted: August 13th, 2007 | Author: Ben | Filed under: Uncategorized |

Possibly the best/worst web innovation I’ve ever experienced is StumbleUpon. Once you start hitting the little green button you can’t stop. You come across a few of those ‘free movie download’ sites that aren’t free and sites by bad designers trying to promote themselves as good designers, but you don’t care. You hit the friendly little button again to feed your hunger for web comics, lists of things you never needed to know and movies of car accidents, pictures of funny looking people and I was just looking at photos of a vampire slaying kit. I don’t need to see that. I don’t need to see any of this stuff, but I’ll click again because hell - my cursor was over in that direction anyway. What does David Lynch say about product placement in a video interview? Do I care? I do but I don’t know why!

It’s an addiction. It has to end.

CTRL + F11 switches off the StumbleUpon toolbar. It was beginning to be a major distraction from work, so making the toolbar disappear has made me more productive (so I can then spend more time writing on my site. Nice one Ben). Now I can switch it on during my lunch break and when I’m on the phone to someone who talks too much. After these I switch it off, and get on with work. Perfect.

Then I press CTRL + F11 again! Damn! It’s the same button to switch it on as it is to switch it off! Who thought of that?! I need a hard way of switching it back on. Something where I have time to stop and think ‘hey, Ben - do you really want to do this? This is the next 30 minutes wasted!’, and then I’d stop switching it on.

Someone needs to write a StumbleAddiction plugin and write it soon. Thousands of Stumblers are at risk. The economy will suffer. The markets will crash. The developed world will fall to it’s knees. Is StumbleUpon doing the work of Al Qaeda?!

It’s a problem. Can somebody fix it?

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