Our friend and brother, Muhammad Saleem, has just released a new website, StumbleRank. As the name suggests, the top ranking StumbleUpon users are showcased on the site.

As the introductory text on the site mentions, this site was done for the fun and social aspects of StumbleUpon. It is also an excellent way to make friends with the top users. This will allow you to see what is being stumbled, what the latest stories are and what is happening on the Net.

We think this is a good indication of the next generation of the Web gaining new ground. As Mashable mentions, StumbleRank is an unofficial list of top StumbleUpon users. Muhammad is an exemplary model of how the next generation of web users will display their talents and creative ideas. Taking a well-known social media platform and developing an idea that plays off the original. This is way beyond Web 2.0. Let’s see how this ignites the web.

Don’t forget to add Muhammad and IslamCrunch to your StumbleUpon friend list. Check out Muhammad’s post about StumbleRank here.

UPDATE: Just noticed our friend, Korayem, is also on the StumbleRank list. Please add him as well.

FriendFeed makes it easy to keep track of the web pages, videos, music, and photos your friends and family interact with around the Internet. The site is currently in a private beta-testing period. However, ISLAMCRUNCH has invites for you!

For this invite, we will make it a little more challenging. Click on the FriendFeed logo below and choose a social network or service to share this article. If you don’t belong to any social networks, you can send an email to all your friends about this article. Once that is done, drop a comment here and share with us which social network or channel you chose.

From FriendFeed - About Us: 

“Our goal is to make content on the Web more useful and discoverable by taking advantage of your social connections. FriendFeed is a simple tool that scratches the surface of that goal by making it easier to keep track of the web pages, videos, music, and photos your friends and family interact with around the Internet.

With FriendFeed, you list the people you want to keep in touch with. They let us know what services they use (e.g., Flickr or Facebook or Picasa Web Albums), and you get a personalized feed of what they are up to. So, if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. You don’t need to install anything to use FriendFeed — our crawling technology automatically picks up all the stuff you do on the web sites you already use with no additional effort on your part.”

Side note: For those who are using YouTube, IslamCrunch highly recommends Muxlim.tv for user-generated video media.

We would like to thank Scott, our Pownce friend for sending us the invite.

In what looks like an attempt to simplify the Facebook profile, Facebook has quietly added mini icons. Nothing is mentioned on their ‘Featured Updates’ page or Facebook’s blog. The social networking news blog, Mashable, also had no mention of this new Facebook feature.

These icons show the apps on the user’s profile page. From a design perspective, this not only simplifies the profile page but gives the page a better aesthetic appeal. With Facebook users going app-crazy, the icons are an easier navigation tool as you browse your friend’s profile. (Facebook allows users to re-arrange the layout of the apps and features on their profile). Instead of searching for the app on the page, the icons will help you navigate to a specific app.

Mainstream-Islam.com has added new videos to complete the 5 daily prayer “how to” videos. We recently featured their fajr prayer video and we have been waiting for the release of these new videos. We decided to upload all videos detailing the 5 prayers on Muxlim.tv. The video below shows the Maghrib prayer. 

Fajr prayers : http://beta.muxlim.tv/video/xBjFdFhBJrH

Dhuhr, ‘Asr and ‘Isha prayers (Part 1) : http://beta.muxlim.tv/video/CkKO4MHzlRe

Dhuhr, ‘Asr and ‘Isha prayers (Part 2) : http://beta.muxlim.tv/video/ON5o4g17KWt

Maghrib prayers : http://beta.muxlim.tv/video/HpM2saUy3Tj

Needless to say, the method of prayer in these videos are according to the Shafi’i madhhab. If our readers know of any high-quality, detailed videos showing prayer for other schools of thought, please add the links in our comments section.

Or better yet… since Muxlim.tv is a social media site with web 2.0 features, you can add video responses showing the prayers according to a different school of thought. Please post your comments and ratings on each of the videos, share them with family & friends and embed the video files on your site.

Who says that being active in comments is a waste of marketing exposure? We received an email notification that a new comment was added to a comment we had posted. Intrigued by the URL provided, we decided to look at the the Dua4Me site.

As the name implies, the site encourages that you make a dua (Arabic for supplication) for me or anyone else. Essentially, Dua4Me is a Digg-style site that ranks duas. Instead of the usual ‘vote for me’ plea on most Digg-style sites, an added dimension is the spiritual request of actually supplicating for the person or cause described in the dua listing.

We have made one dua request for our friends at Illume Magazine to test Dua4Me. Soon after, we received an email from Safi, Dua4Me creator and administrator, who mentioned that he hopes to develop his site “into an Islamicized/Spiritual Next Generation Digg.” Also, IslamCrunch was the first registered user - another experience for us as early adopter beta testers.

Dua4Me uses Pligg, the free open-source social content management system. Other Islamic sites that use Pligg are UmmahWatch and Good Muslim News. All three sites are not listed on Pligg.org - a free directory of Pligg powered sites.

UPDATE: Brother Safi has added a dua request for IslamCrunch. Please visit this link to make dua for us. Thanks!