StumbleUpon
Press the green Stumble button and the toolbar threw you onto a semi-random webpage matched to your interests. Thumbs up or thumbs down, and it learned. StumbleUpon was the platonic ideal of productive procrastination: the perfect tool for losing an entire afternoon, one weird website at a time.
StumbleUpon launched in November 2001, founded by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance, and Eric Boyd while Camp was a grad student at the University of Calgary. The premise was elegant: a browser toolbar with one job, turning the web into a personalized random walk. For a certain breed of 2000s internet user, that green button was the front door to everything strange and wonderful online.
eBay bought the company in May 2007 for over $75 million, when it had 2.3 million users. The pairing never quite worked, and Camp and Smith bought their company back in April 2009 for $29 million. Growth kept coming for a while — 25 million users by April 2012 — but the social feeds were taking over the job of deciding what you saw next. StumbleUpon shut down in June 2018, migrating accounts to Mix.com, a successor Camp had built. Camp, meanwhile, had gone on to co-found Uber. For millions who grew up stumbling, nothing ever really replaced the feeling of the open web arriving one click at a time.
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