This thing has a special, funny significance for me. A friend of mine recently met someone through the social aspect of Stumbleupon. They met through their shared interests and really hit it off. They decided to get married about two months after meeting on stumble, and have been living together for several months. I think its a bit crazy but it makes for a good story.
These sorts of tools could be useful for a library to promote content and increase patron participation (seems to be a common theme here). A specific network for the library could be created using one of the sites, and then the library staff could submit interesting articles. This would allow the users to rate how interesting or useful they are. The users could also use this as a way to show a library an area of interest that should be addressed.
The big problem is that just because things are popular does not mean that they are good or valid. The most popular things on these sites often seem to be lowest common denominator material. Also, I think they are excellent ways to waste time. Several of my friends are digg or stumble users, and they always talk about how much time they waste using them. These tools can be used to find some very interesting things, but a lot of the time it is just funny or interesting fluff.
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