Deep Jive Interests

For people who use StumbleUpon — ever wonder what your StumbleUpon ranking is?

Well, there isn’t a direct way of measuring that on StumbleUpon, and I suspect that part of the reason why there isn’t one list is to prevent gaming of the service. But that hasn’t stopped intrepid social-media-maven Muhammad Saleem from cobbling his own service together based on an not-as-yet-published API for StumbleUpon — and its called StumbleRank.

Long and short of it is that by inputting your StumbleUpon profile (or, perhaps, someone else’s), you can add that profile to a growing list of Stumblers, which you can sort based on a number of publicly available metrics, such as pages, photos, and videos stumbled. Most importantly, you can sort it by the number fans you might have (or, someone else might have).

StumbleUpon does have a page with the purported “Top Stumblers” in the community but its woefully incomplete as there are many Top Stumblers not included, and many alleged “Top Stumblers” who don’t appear to be Top Stumblers at all based on the number of pages and so on they may have Stumbled on in the past.

Mind you, its possible that there are hidden / unpublished metrics that propel some people into that last, and are at the same time penalizing others from appearing on that list, but until such metrics are theorized, having a transparent means of ranking makes a lot of sense to me.

I have a more detailed interview with Muhammad over at the BlogHerald which is worth checking out as we talked about his rationale behind StumbleRank, how gamers might use StumbleRank, and what his thoughts are about StumbleRank as a target for potential legal action (as a ‘derivative’ work).

All in all a great piece of work, and something I’m sure is only the first of many things to come for Mr. Saleem.