By Jaime Woo

At the end of May, the Mesh Conference brought some of the internet’s finest to Toronto. In the MaRS building, Canadians-done-good Michael Geist, Lane Merrifield, and Garrett Camp spoke about technology and the web. Laptops were open, ready to Google a fact or Twitter about a comment. We caught up with Garrett Camp just before he was about to have a night on the town. Camp, a Calgarian, was excited to meet up with some friends in the city and explore Toronto. (“I’m supposed to meet up with a friend who lives on B-L-O-R-E Street?” he asks someone.)
Speaking with Garrett Camp about StumbleUpon, the website he helped start and recently sold to eBay for $75 million, it’s easy to imagine what Camp was like back in his university days when he was still tinkering with the site in his bedroom. Throughout the interview, he leans over the table, fidgets with his fingers, and thinks aloud working out scenarios in his head—a stream of 0s and 1s run invisibly through his mind. StumbleUpon by most measures is a success: the site has five million users who altogether stumble between 10–12 million times per day. (“Stumbling” is to view a random internet page with a relevant and interesting article, image, or application. The five billionth stumble occurred this year.) Still, Camp is focused on figuring out how to keep StumbleUpon growing—the site’s number of users has quintupled since the summer of 2006—although it wasn’t that long ago when having a fraction of the current users convinced Camp of the site’s success.

StumbleUpon was started in 2002 by Camp and three others when Camp was still in graduate school in Alberta. The inspiration for StumbleUpon was to create something that helped kill time, no doubt in part to help Camp procrastinate writing his thesis (on how to make search queries more effective). A year or two after inception, when much of the work was still being done out of bedrooms, StumbleUpon had amassed 50,000 users. Camp knew the site had made it after he and his partners decided to experiment with advertising and found that users didn’t mind: “We made sure to include ads that were good and targeted.” Now, Camp is setting his sight on tackling the 70 million-user giant of the industry: Facebook.
Facebook started as a way to keep in touch with friends, while StumbleUpon started as an easy way to discover interesting stuff. Interestingly, the two sites have started to move in on each other’s territory. Facebook allows users to not only keep tabs on friends, but also on the random links and videos they suggest. StumbleUpon gives users the content and now moves towards layering community interactions and social networking on top of it. Camp sees a StumbleUpon in the future where users could add their own commentary on top of a website which friends of the user could view and add to: “We want conversation around the content.”
The key is that StumbleUpon is an add-on to an internet browser: upon seeing something worth sharing, instead of having to use an intermediary (like sending an email or posting on Facebook), a user could write private comments on top of the site, alert his or her friends, and create a more spontaneous conversation right where the content is. It would also diversify the StumbleUpon experience from a solo stumbling to something more social, necessary for website longevity.
Camp also places an emphasis on making StumbleUpon easy to use. So easy, he says, that a surprising demographic is using the site: seniors. “The children of older people are installing StumbleUpon for them and they end up using the site a lot as a guide to the internet,” says Camp. “We have an 82-year-old man who is ex-military and he is stumbling all the time.”
For all those sitting in their bedrooms dreaming up ideas for the future: what does Camp see as the progression of the web? “We’re going to see sites that tie all of the available services out there together, an integration of stuff. It’ll be like the Grey Album,” he says, referencing the Danger Mouse album that combined elements of the Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album, “people will create mash-ups on their site.”
Photo by Jaime Woo.