So I love the Stumble Upon toolbar. I like it as a user, it can be a real time suck. I like it as a blog owner because it can drive traffic like nothing else I've ever encountered. It is simple, easy to comprehend and just plain fun.
I was curious as to what other competitors might be out there. And I found a few.
The market leader. They have a well designed toolbar, website and backend system. The sites can be rated with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down button. Lots of additional features but they are all superfluous. The only thing that matters is that you can submit a site easily, rate a site easily and view a random site at the click of a button. Simplicity drives the success of this toolbar.
A direct competitor to the stumble upon toolbar. The one problem I have with it in comparison to StumbleUpon is the handling of categories. SU allows you to choose a subset of categories from which to return a site. Streakr lets you choose All categories or One category. Neither one of those choices is exactly what I want. A bit nitpicky of me I think.
Bills itself in the same space but it is not quite as good. It pulls you back to TheRandomSite.com with a featured content link. It is also slower than stumble upon. This is a sub-optimal solution and we should not pursue this technique.
This random button is a secondary install for the google toolbar. It returns a random site based on your previous search history. The returned sites don’t seem to be as interesting as an anecdotal review.