StumbleUpon has just released a new toolbar-free version, but until now it’s only available to certain users, including me. So, if you don’t see it, don’t panic, probably they are currently testing it and it will soon be available for everyone.

The new version features a star rating for websites and a button you can place on your website where users can vote you directly. The button also shows how many votes the page has. Take a look at it:

Finally, they seem to have understood that people don’t like to spend time and are lazy, so they lost a lot by requiering them to install the toolbar. Now the toolbar is in a web version and it makes things easier, even if it’s not so feature-full as the install version. Check it out here, it might work for you too.

The website layout has also changed a lot and it offers everyone to vote a website directly from the review page, also it shows websites relevant to it.

The profile page has also changed, but not very much.

In conclusion, they seem to have done a great thing with it and the membership will definitely grow at a much faster rate that it was until now.

What do you think about it ? Do you see it already ?

For the last few days, StumbleUpon has continuously banned accounts and a lot are complaining that the traffic has went down. I have a lot of friends that were power users and got their accounts banned for different reasons or for no reason at all.

I have also noticed a decrease in traffic from StumbleUpon, but i can’t tell for sure if it’s because of the algorithm or because my websites have been down and flagged as unavailable, due to my servers issues. I will be able to tell more exactly in the future, when I’ll be sure I’ve got rid of that flag.

Lately, Stumble became the best social network, from my point of view, being easier to market than Digg and sometimes brining more traffic. Unfortunately, Stumble isn’t such a good link bait as Digg, but can still bring some quality, related links.

As you might already now, Digg has screwed it’s algorithm really badly from it’s last updates and has hired moderators that won’t let anything pass to the front page, if they don’t like it. That’s why a lot of users left and some of them joined and started using Stumble. Now, Stumble seems to have taken Diggs example, by screwing it’s algorithm.

There truly are a lot of accounts that ruin the system and have to be banned, but in my opinion, they have to focus on aggressively spamming profiles, haters, flamers and others that do a lot of bad and less on those that do promote their websites, along with many others.

With this I have to say Social Networking has reached a crisis point especially for Social Media Marketers, but for regular users too. Some new idea has to come out and I’m curious when this will happen. Considering this, it seems nothing can’t stay clean, but also this was already known. When something gets big, it has more and more issues, because everyone tries to profit.

I would like to read your opinion about this.