After ten years, which seems like thirty on the Internet, StumbleUpon’s co-founder and CEO Garrett Camp is stepping down from his post and moving on to become chairman of the company.

In a post published on StumbleUpon’s blog, Champ explains that it’s “time for a change”:

After 10 years leading StumbleUpon, it’s time for a change. From Geoff and I working part-time in Canada in 2002 to over 120 talented employees today, I’ve guided StumbleUpon through an unconventional journey. We moved to San Francisco in 2006 (photo above), were acquired by eBay just a year later, spun ourselves out of eBay in 2009, and have since grown the company from 5 million to more than 25 million registered users. The last 3 years have been incredible – completely rebuilding the company and expanding from a simple Firefox add-on to one of the largest discovery platforms on the Web.

Indeed, the company has performed some amazing feats, such as coming back from the dead after being purchased by eBay.

The company will be seeking a new CEO immediately, with the rest of its executive staff staying in place.

Garrett Camp has been spending time on other startups, such as cab-crushing app Uber. It will be interesting to see who StumbleUpon goes with for the top position, as well as what Camp will be working on next.

StumbleUpon recently rolled out a site redesign which had an unfortunate black mark on it, the company decided to remove the red “X” from its toolbar that let you close it.

This “StumbleBar” lets you cycle through random sites and pages to share with others or read later. Many people suggested that the removal of the close button locked you into staying on StumbleUpon and cried foul since you could no longer go directly to the original content creator’s page.

In a blog post today, StumbleUpon announced some tweaks to its new redesign because of the feedback it has gotten:

We’ve recently heard some concerns over the implementation of our new Web StumbleBar, so we wanted to give a quick update on fixes we’ve just made. We have always used an iframe to display the web StumbleBar and site content together; our redesigned StumbleBar works just like it did before. Our previous StumbleBar design included an ‘X’ button (to close the iframe if you wanted to view the original URL) but we didn’t initially make this as part of the redesign for signed-in users. We received several requests for this feature over the last few weeks, so as of today we will be adding this back in for signed-in users. This lets you hide the StumbleBar to see the original link, and simply click back afterwards to return to stumbling.

Instead of the red “X” returning, the company has added a “hide” button to the settings panel on the right-hand side of the page:

When you click the hide button, a warning comes up asking you again if you’d like to hide the StumbleBar. It instructs you to simply return to StumbleUpon’s site to start using it again:

In addition to the change on the StumbleBar, the company has also added an original link to the page’s review section on the site. The company has done this to make sure that content creators get proper attribution and traffic when StumbleUpon is crawled by search engines.

It’s great to see StumbleUpon respond to its users with actual change instead of trying to force things on the userbase. Instead of making excuses, the company put the feedback into action. All companies should pay attention to how StumbleUpon treats its users, who are some of the most loyal on the web.

Popular site and Twitter account BreakingNews has tinkered with using StumbleUpon to submit its articles, and has announced the creation of an official StumbleUpon “Channel” today.

With a whopping 3,379,312 followers on Twitter, the completely internet based news organization is moving its footprint to yet another service.

The channel feature is a new one for StumbleUpon, being released just this week along with an entirely new look for the service. Getting a service like BreakingNews is a huge step forward for its adoption.

Here’s what the BreakingNews team had to say about the new channel on its blog:

We’ve been experimenting with StumbleUpon for months — posting stories by hand — but this week the social discovery site debuted a new “channels” product for brands that allows us to wire our curation directly into the platform. That means you can Stumble an original breaking story seconds after we discover it.

As far as we know, we’re the only branded channel that curates stories from other sources into StumbleUpon, which by extension makes the social platform’s content more up-to-date than ever. And for news organizations that break stories, it means even more traffic for original scoops.

StumbleUpon has continued to increase its traffic, leaving Web 2.0 news sites like Digg in its wake. The StumbleUpon channel feature is still in beta, so it will be interesting to watch how much of a following the news agency can gain from the platform.

➤ BreakingNews StumbleUpon Channel

Recipes aren’t just for mom and grandma anymore. The web has gotten ahold of food and will not let go. Take Gojee for example, it designed a drop-dead gorgeous site that gets you excited about cooking in ways no other cooking blog could.

Punchfork is taking that approach a step further by making recipes a little more social with data, trending content, and search.

What makes Gojee and Punchfork different, is that Gojee is a personal focused recipe site with some sharing features. Punchfork on the other hand focuses on social discovery and tracking trending recipes.

Let there be food

As soon as you sign up, you’ll be shown a homepage with a lot of recipes from all different sources. The display of the recipes is beautifully designed, but it’s the trending nature of the site that will get you interested in what you’re seeing.

Punchfork looks at how often the recipe has been shared, how many people have favorited the recipe, and has a trending algorithm around it that shows you the hottest foods to make. Right now, the site looks at Tweets, Facebook shares, and StumbleUpon views to decide what’s trending.

There are no lack of recipes on Punchfork, which is currently pulling in content from 51 different sites and blogs. Publishers can submit their site for review, but Punchfork decides who makes the cut.

Publishers are shown on a leaderboard tracking their rating average, top rated recipes, and how many recipes they’ve published. Top publishers are shown in order of their rating.

Share your recipes

When I remember my grandmother cooking, she had her recipes stored on index cards in a plastic box. With the internet, that clearly isn’t the case anymore. I imagine that if I could take some of her best recipes and put them on a site like Punchfork, she probably would have been a top contributor. Which leads me to hope that Punchfork can bring in some of the best recipe sites and sharers around, otherwise the content will get stale and people will look elsewhere for their content.

This is a problem that Punchfork may have thought of already, as it has an API that syndicates and distributes top recipes, which can easily lure in the best of the best to share their own.

If you’d like to re-share a recipe you’ve found, there is Google+, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and email buttons.

Your recipe sharing contributes to which concoctions are popular and trending on Punchfork.

Discovery

This is where Punchfork really shines. The search experience is solid on the site, which lets you search for ingredients as well as actual recipes. The ingredient search is something Gojee perfected, and Punchfork isn’t far behind. Once you search for an ingredient like “peanuts”, you’re shown a list of recipes containing them, as well as the ability to sort by Trending, New, or Top Rated.

If you search for ingredients separated by commas, you can find the perfect recipe using all of the items that are your favorite, or that you have at the time.

Unfortunately, the multiple ingredient search isn’t straight forward or explained. I figured it out just by trying.

There’s something missing from this recipe

I was interested to explore how social recipes really could be, but it seems as if Punchfork forgot to finish the job with its site. When visiting someones profile page, you have to click “Favorite Recipes” to see which ones they’ve saved for later. This seems odd, as you would think that the recipes would be displayed as soon as you hit the profile.

That and the fact that you can’t communicate with other members on the site directly by way of direct messaging or comments around a recipe just seems like a missed opportunity for the company. Relying on third-party social networks to engage your users is a really big mistake, as fragmented as they are. Building a brand and community has to happen on your own home base, like Instagram has shown, rather than in bits and pieces on Twitter and Facebook.

Punchfork is a gorgeous site with amazing discovery features. The company should take a few more looks at its user experience and invest in keeping people on its platform, it has an extremely bright future. Hopefully this is something the company is working on. Discovery here is great, but the interaction is non-existent unfortunately.