StumbleUpon has today announced that on October 24th they will be closing down their group, photo and HTML blogging, features and the ability for users to be able to select themes to personalise their experience and reviews of sites.

The reason StumbleUpon is removing the features is to stay true to StumbleUpon’s core features finding sites, and move away from its not so core features that are covered by the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

Marc Leibowitz, Stumble Upon’s vice president of marketing and business development explains:

"Other platforms frankly do a really good job of [customization and self-expression] and that’s what they’re all about. While certain [StumbleUpon users] may not want to go, other services do offer a better experience of that,”

Even though the removal of the services will effect a number of StumbleUpon users Leibowitz added:

"We’re talking about a small, albeit passionate, group of users that were using these bells and whistles…it was costing us time to maintain these things that would be better applied to improving the discovery experience,” - "We regret doing anything that disappoints our users, but this is being done to simplify the service and make it easier to use for a broader audience.”

Source: GigaOm