LeapTag, StumbleUpon, or Both?

If you read Mike Arrignton's review of LeapTag you were probably left wondering, should you use LeapTag, StumbleUpon, or a combination of the two?

StumbleUpon is a social web discovery service that enables you to discover and share websites according to your interests and preference. Simply by installing the StumbleUpon toolbar and setting your preferences, you can start seeing relevant content immediately. Furthermore, by rating the websites you see, you can train the toolbar to better suit your interests. The pages you see are either recommended by your friends, other Stumblers, or are shown simply because they are relevant to your tastes. As of March 16, 2007, StumbleUpon has over 2,000,000 active users.

The premise behind LeapTag and the features that the service offers are strikingly similar to StumbleUpon. LeapTag adds two things to your browser during the installation process: a browser sidebar, and buttons for a menu and adding content to the service.

To enable LeapTag to find results, you must create at least one tag. During the beta period you are limited to no more than 20 tags.

Tags are used as a substitute for categories to help the software decide what pages to show you. I have always been a fan of tags over categories because tags (which essentially function as user-definable categories) give the control to the user and allow for more precision (by not restricting the user to categories that the software designer may think should suffice). I chose the main tag 'social media' and chose sub-tags 'digg', 'netscape', and 'reddit'. Once you do that, you can see your primary tag listed in a browser sidebar.

Clicking the primary tag or the blue refresh icon next to it, opens a page that looks like a socially driven site (as if it were based on Pligg) based on the tags you input.

What I noticed when I looked at this page was that there really isn't much to LeapTag in its current state as far as the maturity or intricacy of its 'web discovery algorithm' is concerned. The results that were being shown to me were simply search engine results for queries of the type '[main tag] AND [sub-tag]' as I had defined earlier.

Furthermore, the other elements to the service are also so much similar to StumbleUpon that the only difference becomes a user-interface one. While StumbleUpon integrates adding and voting on content, as well as setting of preferences (among many other options), in just one easy-to-use toolbar, LeapTag separates the functionality into one button (for adding content and setting preferences), one side-bar (to display different primary tags, as well as stories you have voted on), and a web-page created from your tags on-the-fly.

Seeing as there is no innovation on the part of LeapTag, and that not only does StumbleUpon have a much more sophisticated (and partly socially-powered) algorithm for filtering and displaying content, but also an huge, loyal, and very active user-base already present, I see no reason to give LeapTag a try.

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Cuneyt Ozveren, April 18, 2007

StumbleUpon is useful for finding interesting websites, one at a time. As it says in their website, all of the StumbleUpon recommendations come as a result of collaborative filtering, or the wisdom of crowds: "When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended".

LeapTag's main purpose is to enable people to manage the overwhelming amount of information they receive everyday. LeapTag focuses on the wisdom of one - you the user. You vote on what is relevant and irrelevant. As you point out, LeapTag provides an initial set of results derived from filtered search results, but all subsequent results become more accurate over time as you continue voting and the algorithm understands your interests better.

Marc Orchant from ZDNet has written an accurate analysis of LeapTag: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Orchant/?p=408

Disclosure: I am the CEO of LeapTag

BONTB, May 9, 2007

I will try that LeapTag at home, do you know if they also bring any traffic ?