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WSJ is reporting on tip from an insider that eBay is in advanced talks to acquire StumbleUpon. According to WSJ:

The potential price for a deal is in the range of $75 million, these people say. One of the people said that no final agreement has been reached and the talks could fall apart.

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StumbleUpon has launched a new feature called StumbleThru, that lets you stumble through your favorite sites. So if you are a Flickr freak, you could now use StumbleUpon to stumble flickr photos, give recommendations on the photos and with time the system will start serving you with hyper relevant content. The sites supported by this feature include-Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, Google’s Blogger, Wordpress.com, TheOnion.com, pbs.com, physorg.com, cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, .gov websites, .edu websites.

The initial set of sites for which the feature has been enabled must be the favorite destinations among StumbleUpon users, however their is a lot of useful, interesting and exciting content scattered around the web that is yet to be stumbled. What I would like to have is a way for my visitors to stumble through posts on Startup Meme. The ratings of the users from my blog could then be fed into StumbleUpon’s recommendation engine and could be used to determine which posts are really good, and could be served to general StumbleUpon audience who has the relevant preferences. This will in no time provide StumbleUpon with immense and valuable data about the great content scattered across the web, hidden even from the spying eyes of some of the best Search Engines.

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Just when the news about the acquisition of StumbleUpon by eBay were hitting the blogosphere, Google was busy unwrapping the details on their latest product, which they have named Queryless Search or Google Recommendations. This is the exact same functionality bundled into the Google toolbar that StumbleUpon offers.

The Google toolbar now includes a dice icon, which could be clicked to visit a new random website that Google thinks you will be interesting to you on the basis of your past searches. Google has also launched the Search History to go with the Recommendations, you could sign in to see all your searches.

If visiting sites randomly is not your thing you could also ad the recommendations tab to your personalized homepage. All you need to do is “Add a Tab” and type in “Recommendations” for the tab name (keep the “I’m feeling lucky” checkbox checked) and you will be served a recommendations page daily. See the Recommendations Tab that Google auto generated for me. They already know I was quiet busy covering the Double Click acquisition.

Although Google at the moment is not filtering and weighing in recommendations and rating of other users with similar likings, but I am sure these and other social features will be added soon.

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Techcrunch and GigaOm are reporting that eBay is about to close the acquisition of StumbleUpon, a very addictive social service that lets users discover websites based upon recommendations by people having similar interests. StumbleUpon has been in acquisition discussions since last November with Google, AOL and eBay and the price tag is rumored to be between $40 - $45 million range.

StumbleUpon lets users discover new sites and content around the world via a browser toolbar. All you have to do is to click on Stumble! and it will take you to a random page according to the preferences specified in your profile. After viewing the site you could rate it by by giving it a thumbs up or down. The more you will use stumble upon the better it will get to know about your likings. With this information about you StumbleUpon will begin to serve you highly relevant content that is rated positively by people with similar preferences. People who have once used this service have not seen back, even more so because of the surprise factor in what they might see next, and also because of delivering highly relevant and interesting content.

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Yoono, a startup based in France that allows users to share websites and online articles with others much like StumbleUpon, has launched a new service called “Buzz It”. The new service is similar to what Grouptivity, Clipmarks and Share2Me already offer.

Buzz It is a browser applet that lets users capture text, links, images and video while they browse the web. Users can then use these clippings to post to blogs, social networks or just share it on their Yoono Buzzlog, which can then be made public or private. Yoono already offered browser suggestions as you visit various websites just like StumbleUpon, and is claiming to have more than 600,000 registered users. Yoono is also beefing up its social features and might transform into a full fledge social network, where users could come and share their findings-likings and dis-likings. According to Yoono CEO Pascall Josselin:

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StumbleUpon, a premier social news site has launched a redesigned homepage to look more like a socially driven news and content site. Together with the redesign has come increased usability and host of new features like:

• Del.icio.us like section that shows the recently popular sites.
• “Recent Stumblers” section that shows the people who stumbled recently.
• Most Popular Topics section
• Classic Testimonial section.

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