StumbleUpon Finally Decides to Jump Into the Mobile Game

Let me start by saying: It’s about time.

StumbleUpon released its first-ever mobile app last week, available on the iPhone and Android platforms. I must admit, I find it puzzling that sites such as SU and Digg and Reddit, which were so early in Web 2.0, have been so slow in the app revolution.

Digg’s app only came out in March and was extremely unstable at first, eventually settling down into a rather simple, yet usable app.

The puzzling thing about both the Digg and the SU app is this: You can’t actually submit anything using the app. With Digg, this means you still have to use the mobile site to submit; with SU – you’re just outta luck. Wait until you get home.

That said, the StumbleUpon app on the iPhone is a joy. It’s exceptionally simple to use but contains all the functionality of the site (except submissions), plus one huge bonus over the browser-based Stumble bar.

What’s that, you ask?

The ability to stumble random content without clearing out the shares in your share bar first.

Let me repeat that: You can use StumbleUpon the way it’s meant to be used, no matter how many pages friends have shared with you.

For those of us who spend a lot of time on StumbleUpon, it’s long been a problem. If you go a day or so (sometimes less) without clearing out shares on your Stumble bar, you can’t set about to stumbling randomly, which is the true joy of the site. If you’ve been on StumbleUpon for a while and have accepted friend and sharing requests with lots of people (let’s face it, it’s social media – that’s being social), that share number can creep up quickly.

I love that I have the option of either stumbling the shares or just randomly in any of my selected topics on the mobile app. Just wish they did that with the Stumble toolbar, too.

So, with that joy discovered, I set about to put the app through its paces, and it performed admirably.

First, the welcome page is simple enough. It gives you the options of what type of content you want to check out and the topics you selected as your interests, if you want to stumble through in just one particular area.

Once you hit “Start Stumbling,” you’ll get the bar across the top that allows you to thumb up or down, as well as click through your shares or Stumble randomly.

If you choose to stumble through your shares, another nice difference from the web-based SU: If you accidentally click past one share too quickly, you just hit the “back” arrow and you see not only the share, but who shared it with you and their note. You can get that info from the SU site, but not just from a simple touch of a button. A nice feature.

Here’s how the share looks, when it first comes up, when you click through to the message sent with it and when you click through to see reviews.

OK, so you’re done with shared items or just want StumbleUpon to serve you up some cool content. Say, something filed under news. You can see the site, the page views, those who gave it a thumbs up and read the reviews. You can also share it via SU, e-mail, Facebook or Twitter — whether or not you have Twitter/Facebook integration set up via su.pr on your account. (That’s especially nice for me, as SU seems to have had a glitch recently that’s kept many su.pr users from signing in for weeks. But that’s another story for another day. Note to self: Next blog post.)

Another nice change from the web-based SU to the mobile app is how you can Stumble through photos. You can choose to Stumble just Flickr submissions or other photos. I appreciated it for a couple of reasons.

First, the Flickr integration on the SU app is the same as it is for the Flickr mobile app. You can flip through other photos in the same set and you have all the other navigation tools you ordinarily do:

Also, Flickr tends to be a different kind of photographic experience than flipping through random photo blogs. Now, the photography that gets served to you randomly on SU tends to be of very high quality, but Flickr is heavy on exceptionally talented, professional photographers. It all depends on the type of experience you’re looking for.

Lastly, there’s videos. Again, the integration with YouTube is seamless. I would have liked a similar option for videos as there was for photos – YouTube and then everything else, as sites like TED and Vimeo and others tend to serve up very different types of videos than the random YouTube video. Not better, just different. And randomly stumbling YouTube can be, well, rather random.

The bottom line? The app was (almost) worth the wait. I had downloaded an app some time back that I’ve long since deleted – it purported to give the user the ability to Stumble and Digg and everything else social, but I didn’t find it very useful.

The only real improvements I would suggest for the time being would be the ability to discover something on SU and separating out the YouTube videos. Other than that, I’m quite pleasantly surprised to find features here that are improvements over the web experience. What do you think about StumbleUpon’s mobile app?