By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

While idly browsing online today (as one often does on a Sunday afternoon), I had a look at the options on the new Stumbleupon toolbar for Firefox 3 to see if anything new was there. I was intrigued to discover this:

It turns out that you can export ALL of your Stumbleupon “likes” from your Stumbleupon profile to your Firefox 3 Bookmarks.

The irritating part to this though is that if you have a lot of stumbled likes, it will take a long time for this process to be completed and your browser is basically frozen while it is going on. You can’t use Firefox for other surfing while this is happening and if you eventually want to shut Firefox down, you’ll have to terminate the whole thing. So if you have thousands of stumbles to transfer over, you might want to leave this running overnight while you’re sleeping.

When it’s finished, you’ll have a nice backup of all your stumbled sites in your Firefox bookmarks. You can then repeat the process every week or month depending on the volume of your stumbling activity.

I am pretty certain it doesn’t transfer over your tags as well, but nevertheless, having a simple record of the sites is better than nothing. But in future upgrades, having the tags transferred over would be a nice touch for better organisation purposes. I have over 12,000 stumbled sites and having them all tagged would make my life a lot easier when it comes to tracking down a particular site.

So taking this idea a step further, if you use the Del.icio.us extension which synchronises your Firefox bookmarks with your Del.icio.us account, then you could export your Stumbleupon “likes” to Firefox, then they will be synchronised to your Del.icio.us account. The only downside to that of course is that they won’t be tagged and organised, so it’s up to you if you want to go down that route. Personally I am still debating whether I want to throw 12,000 untagged URL’s into my Del.icio.us account.