StumbleUpon iPad App

There’s about four ways you can read and browse content on the iPad. You could bring in your existing magazine or newspaper subscriptions into specialized apps like Businessweek or The Daily. You could pull in your own RSS feed or browse specially curated articles by apps like Pulse, Flipbook or Zite. Then, there’s the age-old method of browsing the web via the browser (Safari, Terra, Atomic Lite). With StumbleUpon, you can now get articles, videos and photos automatically served to you based on your own interests and the recommendations of the StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon has been around since 2001. But over the past decade, the once popular Web 2.0 destination has refocused towards the mobile web. With the StumbleUpon iPad app, StumbleUpon helps serve users select but random and interesting articles from around the web that you may not have otherwise stumbled upon (pun, very much intended).

For instance, while I used the app for the first time over the past week, the very first article StumbleUpon suggested to me was a Wikipedia article on this insane Euthanasia Coaster. Apparently, it’s some crazy roller coaster designed as a hypothetical contraption for euthanasia. I’m not particularly interested in weird scientific applications for death – but the Euthanasia article is definitely something I would not have discovered on my own.

The StumbleUpon app is quite simple. Once you’ve signed up for an account, selected some early categories of interest (history, clothing, business, technology, etc…) and begun liking or disliking suggested articles, StumbleUpon gets better with each use. As you continue to browse suggested articles from the community, StumbleUpon utilizes machine learning based on your own likes and dislikes to serve you better content over time. At any point while browsing, you may click the stumble button at the top to read a new article. Apart from random stumbling, there’s also a home dashboard that shows a wider range of potentially interesting articles for you.

StumbleUpon comes with all the basic features for content consumption. You can share via Facebook, save any article to Instapaper, email, Google reader, Tweet, etc…

Although I wasn’t a huge StumbleUpon user before. After using the StumbleUpon iPad app as my primary reader for the past week, the app  has earned the app a rightful place aside my other go-to reader apps (Pulse, Flipboard, and Zite).