StumbleUpon announced several upcoming changes that will roll-out over the next few weeks.

The changes include:

1. Separation of “friends” and “Subscription.” You will be able to opt-out of subscribing to your friends stumbles.
2. You will be able to subscribe to someone’s content without becoming their friend.
3. You will be able to subscribe to more than 200 people.
4. “Friends” will be mutual friends, “fans” will become subscribers and you will be able to “Subscribe to” stumblers who rate great content.
5. Removal of “ghost” friends/fans. These are people who left SU or deleted their accounts. So don’t be too alarmed about a drop in followers.
6. The order of fans is changing. The newest members to SU will show first, rather than the last who friended you.

StumbleUpon is trying to separate the social and content aspects of their system. This is a big step forward in that direction. This is great news for those who want to find great content and it is bad for social marketing.

IMO, this will be huge for their advertising department and ridding the site of spam.

If you are looking for an easy way to multiply your friends a hundred-fold, you are in the wrong place. However, if you are looking for a way to increase your friends total and have a good reputation on StumbleUpon, you are in the right place. You will not gain a hundred friends in a day, but you will over a course of several months.

Finding friends on StumbleUpon may seem like a daunting task at first, but once you find out how you’ll see it is one of the easier social networking sites to connect through. Here are 10 steps to take to multiply your friends.

Steps:

1. Import contacts from another service. Once you join, you will be able to add friends from another service. You can do this by clicking “Send to” and scroll down to “Import Contacts…” You’ll then be able to import contacts through MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL, LinkedIn, Facebook, your address book, or you can enter an Email manually.
2. Be active and Stumble. Many believe that they can join StumbleUpon and automatically become friends with everyone. This isn’t the case. In order to get friends you must be active. Stumble sites, tag them, review them, and add pretty photos to your SU blog (right click photo/click “StumbleUpon PhotoBlog it!”). After you have a significant amount of activity people will flock to your profile.
3. Add your fans. You should have at least a few fans following you. Search through them and add those with the same interests as you and have a few hundred pages Stumbled–the more the better.
4. Add those who have Stumbled your sites. If you own a website or blog, usually someone who submitted your pages is a good candidate for befriending.
5. Add those who consistently enjoy pages you Stumble. If you notice someone consistently enjoying the same pages as you, add them. You’ll be surprised on the amount of friends you’ll find this way.
6. “Meet people like you.” Click ‘friends’ within your profile, a list saying “Meet people like you” will be listed on the right side of the page. This list displays Stumblers with similar interests as you using an algorithm. View their profile and if they seem close, add them.
7. “People Online Now Near You.” Click the ‘People’ tab within your profile. This displays a list titled, “People Online Now Near You.” Not all of them will have the same interests as you, so search through them and find those who do. Add them.
8. “Find People Interested in.” You may have noticed that when you clicked ‘People’ a list on the right side is of your interests. Click a word and a list of “People Who Like” will show along with the featured sites. Here you can sift through your interests for those who have similar tastes as you. Add those who are most like you.
9. Add these people with the same interests as you.
10. Use the Stumble Stumblers feature. On the toolbar, click “All” and slide down to “Stumblers”. This will let you Stumble through other SU members profiles. Add those with similar interests as you with a good number of pages recently Stumbled and less than 200 mutual friends. Stumblers usually look at those who fan them, if they like what they see they will add you.

Bonus step: Add a link to your StumbleUpon profile on your blog/website or social networking profile.

Did I miss anything? Leave your tips for finding friends in the comments.

Yes, yes, the new Entrecard Toolbar is out, and it is great right? Well, sort of. It does have its bugs, but doesn’t all new programs?

For those of us who want to open more than 10 websites at a time it can be a pain. It is a good thing Firefox extensions can be edited within your own computer.

Want to open 20, 30, or even 40 tabs at a time? Well here’s how

1. go to C:Documents and Settings[user]Application DataMozillaFirefoxProfiles[profile]extensionsec_toolbar@entrecard.comchrome
2. Extract ec_toolbar.jar using 7-zip or WinZip or WinRar
3. go to content
4. open ec_toolbar.js using notepad
5. go to line 572 or search ec_toolbar_next_10
6. change all 10s to 20s (or whatever number you want)
7. delete ec_toolar.jar (or better yet, make a copy and save it somewhere else)
8. highlight the content and skin folder, right click and zip them.
9. rename the file to ec_toolbar.jar

And you’re finished!

You can easily change the skin the same way. Just go to the skin folder and change the images, then zip it and change the name.

Note: No disrespect to Phirate or the EC team is intended. All I want is for everyone to be able to enjoy the EC toolbar.

In a previous article we talked about how to import your contacts, send webpages to mutual friends, and email pages to non-StumbleUpon users. This article goes in depth on who to send content to and who to avoid for the webpage to benefit most from StumbleUpon.

Step 1: Find a Webpage

With StumbleUpon, this should be quite easy. If you don’t already have a webpage in mind, Stumble through different categories on StumbleUpon using the ‘Stumble’ button. Once you have found a quality page you wish to send, you can move onto the next step.

Tips to find great, new content:

• Search Wikipedia. Wikipedia has many fascinating articles and their database has a growing number of articles each day.
• Keep current. Read news articles to keep current on world events; there is always something happening.
• Be social media active. If you don’t already have an account for Digg or Reddit, get one. There are many great articles submitted everyday and not every one of them has been submitted to StumbleUpon. Do SU a favor by submitting the most interesting and highly voted articles.
• Try Entrecard. Entrecard has many small blogs which go almost unseen. By searching through the thousands of blogs you are bound to find something. If you submit the quality articles, not only will you give yourself a boost, but the author as well.

Step 2: Finding a Relevant Friend

If you already know your friends interests, this should be easy; however, if you are using StumbleUpon the way I do (by adding those who have the same interests), this can become tiresome. Since my interests are wide-ranged, I have mutual friends ranging from web-design to sports to politics. Yikes!

The best way to find a relevant friend is by going through your “Mutual Friends” list one-by-one. Since this will become exasperating if you have many contacts, keep notes on each one so next time the work will be easier.

Step 3: Sending the Page

Sending the webpage is probably the easiest step of all. Just click “Send to”. If your friends username isn’t listed directly below, try going to ‘All Friends’ to find them.

Once you found your friends name, click on it. A small dialog box will appear with an input box. Enter a short message about the page and click ‘Send.’

Who to Avoid

When sending webpages it necessary to send only to contacts who will be interested in the content. Otherwise, the page is likely to be ignored (so you wasted their and your time) or the page will be thumbed down immediately (which is counterproductive).

What to Avoid

• Avoid acting like an advertiser
• Avoid sending pages too often
• Avoid sending spammy or otherwise annoying pages.

What You Should Do

• Share interesting content
• Share different types of content
• Use the comment function
• Send pages to relevant friends

The most talked about green technologies today are ethanol (if you consider that green), solar panels, and wind turbines, but what about the other lesser known green technologies that have the capability of transforming the way we live? Here is a list of the top 10 least talked about green technologies.

10. Inflatable Solar Collectors

The inflatable solar collectors contain inflated mirror concentrators which gather sunlight and focus it onto photovoltaic cells. They can withstand 100mph wind and rain, insects, dirt and more.

9. Solar Ovens

Not only do these help sanitize water, but can also cook just about anything. These bad boys can get up to 300°F making fuel consumption unnecessary.

8. Molten Salt Storage

Not necessarily a green technology by itself, but when combined with solar collectors these bad boys will collect heat and release it in a controlled manner for steam turbine power generation.

7. Algae Biodiesel

Carbon neutral? Check. Replace oil? Check. One dollar a gallon? Holy crap get this stuff rolling!

6. Windbelt Micro-wind

This technology could possibly make wind energy 10-30 times more efficient. Currently the Windbelt Micro-wind only works on a small scale, but hopefully in a few years this technology can be harnessed for something much, much bigger.

5. Airborne Wind Turbine

Although these things look like they are going to pop any second, they will soon be capable of producing electricity for as cheap as $0.02 per KWh.

4. Bluenergy Solar-Wind Turbine

The best of both worlds. Why take up more space than you have to? Bluenergy Solar-Wind Turbines don’t use solar panels or wind turbines; instead, they use solar cells and wind vanes to capture both energy causing elements.

3. Solar Panel Windows

Why bother putting solar panels on your roof when you can turn your existing windows into solar windows? Just paint your windows with a transparent organic dye and wrap it with a window frame that has photovoltaic (PV) cells and bam! Electricity.

2. Highway wind turbines

Highways in San Francisco generate 10mph wind that could soon be harnessed by highway wind turbines. Each turbine would produce 9,600 KwH of energy annually, enough to power 700 homes.

1. Solar Textiles

Turn the sun’s energy into electricity by using textiles. KVA Matx has designed The Soft House which can create up to 16,000 watt-hours of electricity by transforming household curtains into felxible, semi-transparent, solar collectors. Currently the design is years away from being cost efficient, but as the designer says, “Never underestimate the power of the architectural imagination.”

Runner ups:
Inflatable Solar Panels
Light rail from NJ highways