the blog

Last summer Andy Wall became Xerpi's newest employee — but I like to think of him as our man of mystery.

What exactly does Andy do? When I asked him that, he gave me a funny answer.

Q: I don't think I know your title.
A: I don't either.

The problem isn't that he does too little, but that he does too much! "I've come on to do a little bit of everything," Andy told me during one phone conversation. "I've been doing design work on some new features, and I've been thinking about some marketing that we could do."

The new Xerpi email/web hybrid is a part of that effort, but Andy Wall hinted that it's just the first of many design enhancements to come. "We've got to sit down and prioritize them and figure out exactly what to do."

Andy's also checking under Xerpi's hood. (Or as he tells it, "I'm also doing a little bit of work on the core technology.") He's poking around the raw computer code that runs the site, including checking out its Ruby on Rails framework and an SQL database. Er, how many records are in Xerpi's database? Is it more than a thousand?

"More than a million," Andy replies.

And it all started when he'd bumped into an old friend on the street — Con Way Ling (the founder of Xerpi). "Con Way and I were old friends," Andy explained. "We lost contact with each other for a while, and then I randomly moved to New York, and Con Way moved here. And we randomly ran into each other on the street. It turned out we lived just a few blocks away from each other!"

Andy tested the beta version of Xerpi, and gave Con Way some useful feedback. But the first nice surprise was "Con Way actually worked on a lot of the things that I talked about." Soon Xerpi became the center of Andy's web surfing — and he loved the convenience and the ease of managing his bookmarks. "The thing that really captured me was that the bookmarks were laid out so well on the page. I didn't have to go through this process of hunting through folder hierarchies to find my different bookmarks. They're all just sitting there on the page."

The experience ultimately led him to a fateful decision. "I decided I'd really like to apply my work energy to continuing to improve Xerpi — given how much

I've gotten out of it myself." And Andy wants to share the same experience with you. "We've been hearing a lot of really good feedback from our users and we're trying to take that and work it into a development plan," he told me. Now he's encouraging Xerpi's users to send feedback — and to share the same exciting energy he feels when he's helping to build Xerpi.

"Hopefully Xerpi will be a big thing on the internet and make the internet better for a lot of people," Andy says. And Xerpi will be a little bit better because of feedback from people like you, me, and Andy.

"We just get really good ideas from people that way."

I love Xerpi. But how does the rest of the web feel?

I'm always thrilled when I come across another Xerpi user describing their feelings on the web. And it's even more interesting when it's not just a single blog post — but an entire conversation.

MIT's Technology Review had posted an article about some technology news from 2007. (Microsoft had released a new application which let users create...lists of their favorite videos, images, web sites — whatever.) Xerpi's founder, Con Way Ling, turned up in the comments to point out that Xerpi has a similar goal — "to make the internet personally relevant." He touts Xerpi's "intuitive drag and drop features," and points out that there's lots of ways to share favorite links, ultimately creating a community of users.

But soon another voice joined the conversation — and it turned out to be a happy Xerpi user! ("I really appreciate it's organic layout," wrote a use named "Mollymeghanmiller.") Molly emphasized everything Con Way was saying — that Xerpi is not only easy to use, but a great way to discover new sites. "Unlike most of the competitors, it isn't in a list...form," she points out, adding that Xerpi is great for "finding new interesting sites through the public views and through my social network — the friend blocks that I have set up on new tabs." And her favorite feature is the "Post to" Xerpi buttons — because they make it so easy to snag cool web sites for your favorites blocks.

It's nice to know there's people out there who love Xerpi just as much as I do. It was a wonderful moment of web zen, with Xerpi's founder randomly meeting a satisfied Xerpi user. But I think my favorite part is it took place in the comments of another article — so the discussion of Xerpi appeared under a magically appropriate title.

"How to Organize the Web."

Do they ever think about Xerpi in our nation's capitol?

At least one blogger says the answer is yes. I was reading the blog post of someone called "Agent Grey." They complained about the cold in D.C., described the strange people seen on the bus — and then added "Super diggin this web app, Xerpi."

I hadn't really thought of that. Xerpi is really useful for organization my favorites. But imagine if you had a gazillion links all scattered throughout your browser's bookmark file — and then you imported them into Xerpi all at once!

In fact, "Agent Grey" only has one complaint. Xerpi made it so easy to organize his favorites, he wanted to import the finished product back into his browser's bookmark file. And apparently he knows something I don't know — because his blog quotes an email from Xerpi saying they're already working on this feature!

And in the meantime, he's a happy customer.

So until then, you should really try this thing out if you are at a loss as to what you have bookmarked over the years..."

I've been thinking about Barack Obama. America's got a new President — and some new history. And for the last few months, we've been hearing stories about the new administration.

But what do Xerpi's users think?

I like to think of it as a chance for a fresh perspective. Like everything else, Xerpi users have their own personal set of favorites — and Xerpi's tags gives you a chance to peek in on 'em! (Or at least, the ones that they've made public.) It's been said that a newspaper is a first draft of history. But the favorites on Xerpi let you experience events in an entirely new way. It's unpredictible — and sometimes very special.

I typed "Obama" into Xerpi's search engine, and discovered someone had also created tags specifically for his inauguration. Want to watch the ceremony again? MSNBC's got it covered! And one Xerpi user has discovered "Change You Can Wear" — a web page offering some very hip t-shirts that are riffing on the president's new image. Of course, Xerpi's users found Barack Obama's web site — but they also found his Facebook page. And one blogger had even compared news footage of both John McCain and Barack Obama...dancing. Of course, this web page quickly became somebody's Xerpi favorite too!

And then I got an idea — what would happen if you typed "McCain" into Xerpi's search engine? I expected many things, but none of them prepared me for the "John McCain Green Screen Challenge." Video maestros re-edited a McCain campaign speech, splicing the candidate into footage from Star Trek, Pulp Fiction, and The Big Lebowski. A blog called "Caffeine-fueled" (promising "Slightly Jittery Entertainment") had selected the best videos from a contest suggested by Stephen Colbert. And that became somebody's Xerpi favorite too.

In fact, it looks like that blog's been linked to quite a bit. They've also got a funny post called "Words that I Can No Longer Use Thanks to the Current Election." ("Maverick.") I found that when I searched Xerpi for the word "Palin." Ironically, John McCain's running mate came up seven times more often than our current Vice President, Joe Biden.

Some of the links were negative and some were positive, but I guess that's all part of the fun. (They're somebody's else's favorites — not mine!) And they're all part of this moment in time. When the history happened, what were other Xerpi users thinking about?

Now you know! :)

I hope everyone had a brilliant Christmas or holiday and New Years!!

My friend Nguyen besides being my cookie, food and half-seater twin is a Xerpi expert. In addition to being one of the first people to get Xerpi's benefits he's constantly using Xerpi to make is life easier. He recently sent me a note with some of his little tricks. I thought I'd share them with you.

Nguyen says:
1. I'm re-naming my ToBeFiledLater to AAToBeFiledLater so that it is first in the drop down selection menu whenever I'm saving a new bookmark.

2. I've created a TaxiBlock to help shuttle links from one Display Tab to the next, since you can only drag and drop blocks from one view tab to the next and not able to drag individual links....

I love the Taxi Block idea. It works great. Thank Nguyen.

Everyone -- enjoy! And feel free to send in tips for using Xerpi and we'll post them.

Web shopping lists are the next step — and I've got proof that they work. My girlfriend's birthday is December 21, so I knew I had to buy her twice as many gifts. I started looking for her presents in October, and began saving links for all the gift ideas I was considering. On December 7 — nice and early — I scanned through the whole list and picked out the best presents — and then placed all the orders online. Now as long as the U.S. Postal Service doesn't let me down, she'll have a merry Christmas and a happy birthday!

And I didn't even have to look for a parking space...

Maybe in the next century, children won't understand this concept of a written Christmas list — and they won't even understand the concept of a crowded shopping mall. The requesting and purchasing of gifts may all happen online. And when that happens, some of those lists will probably be generated on a site like Xerpi.

It's already starting to happen. People really did use the web this year to get gifts under their tree. According to Forbes, this year online purchases of electronics went up an amazing 24% for the week after Thanksgiving.

I'm not the only one thinking about this. My first gift this year was a special Christmas issue of Archie comics digest, and it shows Santa building a web page to accept gift requests for the teenagers of Riverdale. {"Think of what a tremendous time-saver this idea can be" says a female elf.)

Jughead thinks it's a hacker playing a trick, but eventually he and Archie agree to give it a try.
It's all working splendidly until the female elf replaces all the video games Archie requested with instructions on how to play "spin the bottle."

"But those video games are what the boys want!"
"It's what the boys think they want..."

Jughead is still furious that Santa didn't bring him video games — but Archie is delighted. (And so is Big Ethel, who chases Jughead with the bottle...)

Maybe someday we'll even hear stories about Santa using Xerpi. Wait, wait, hear me out. It seems like tracking the deserving children of the world would require a site like Xerpi. After all, Santa has to...

• Make a list
  
• Check it twice
  
• Update "naughty" and "nice" statuses
  
• Keep track of who's awake...
  

I imagine him creating a series of tabs for each time zone, and then adding a block for each state on those tabs. (Actually, Santa might want a group of blocks for each state, so he could collate good children for each major metropolitan region.) Delivering all those gifts would still be a logistical nightmare, but each child's name could be linked to the gifts Santa's decided to bring them. (Or, for bad kids, what type of coal...)

Okay, Santa would have to have a pretty big Xerpi home page.

But at least then he could remember all of Jughead's video games.

I love this time of year. (And I can't believe it's been a whole year since my last Christmas post on Xerpi!) Last year I re-wrote the lyrics of "Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer," so for this year's treat, I decided to give it another try — using the tune of "Frosty, the Snowman."

Only the this time the jolly, happy soul is a web site aggregating all your favorite links into an elegant web-based interface!

Xerpi, my home page
put my favorites in a list
     which I'll move around
     choosing where they're found
so no web site's ever missed!

Xerpi, the web page
gathered all my favorite links.
     And a pretty square
     searching tags can share
what another user thinks.

A thousand unseen users save their favorite links for you.
And you can help them pick them out with community views too!

Xerpi the web page
makes my web browser seem smart.
      Give the site a try
     And you'll see just why
Xerpi's logo has a heart.

Xerpi's launching a new feature! It's a hybrid technology that combines web browsing with email! I was so excited that I cornered one of Xerpi's new-hires, and he spilled the beans about the new button that Xerpi's built for web browsers...even though it hasn't been officially announced!

"Xerpi has traditionally been a place to store bookmarks," explained Andy Wall, one of Xerpi's newest developers. "What we've just finished putting together is button you can install in your browser allowing you to share links! Instead of just storing them on Xerpi, it lets you to send an email to a friend -- it pulls up an email interface where it's stored your addresses. So it's a really convenient, one-click way to share a link."

And best of all, they're releasing a sneak preview for readers of this blog! Just click this link. It's a bookmarklet! It's an email! It's really cool, and I love it!

I was curious about the philosophy behind the button, but Andy said he'd been working on building something that's as easy-to-use as Xerpi itself. "You type in the first couple of letters of the person that you want to send it to. You can give it an extra note if you want -- or not. You click 'send'...and it's gone!" He's pretty excited about the concept -- and with easy forwarding, it adds the potential of "exponential" popularity for the links being sent. And the email tells friends about Xerpi, too, since the email indicates how the link was forwarded. "What I was trying to think of is how do we make Xerpi more viral," Andy confided, "and I wanted to have it in a way that was non-intrusive, so people were doing it naturally in the course of using a service that we provided that they were enjoying!"

Andy also told me another secret: that working for Xerpi is like working for a promising startup company. (Though when I asked if that meant everyone runs around in a coffee-induced frenzy, he laughed and said it's a little more chilled out than that.) "In general, we just have fun. It's like a small group of friends." But I had to laugh when Andy told me how he got the idea. Apparently one of the great things about being a developer is that when you've got a pet peeve, you can fix it for everybody!

"One of the things that actually annoys me when I'm online is it's hard to share links. You've got to open your email account, cut and paste the link into an email, address it, and send it. It should be easier than that.

"So I was thinking: why doesn't Xerpi build that...?"

 
There's been some excitement over the weekend -- the kind of mass uproar that can only happen on the internet. 22 million people use a home page service provided by Google. But according to some of them, last Thursday Google decided to screw it all up. One angry user even created the image above as a protest, giving it the title "If you want to leave iGoogle, you have options."

Here's what started the uproar. Users suddenly discovered their home page was being cluttered up with a huge new column that Google had inserted without asking. Within days, I saw over 4,000 angry messages in the support forum for the site. And in the middle of the outcry, I saw one user repeating the same question: Is there any other option for a home page service on the internet?

Why, yes there is! :)

Xerpi lets users organize collections of favorite links -- I still love the colored boxes -- and customize the look of their page until it's just the way they want it. There's more sophisticated features too, but Xerpi's value proposition is really the elegant, clear, simplicity of the Xerpi home page, which makes it easy to maintain your personal collection of favorite web pages. Google's mistake was deciding that Google knew best how their users' home pages should look. Now they're discovering many angry users who disagree. As one blogger put it: "iGoogle has become TheirGoogle.

"It is not a personal home page if I can't control the layout."

But Google's not the only company that's learning lessons the hard way. Sunday Yahoo angered its users by suddenly turning all of their user profiles blank as part of a redesign. An upgrade Thursday to Flickr's "Recent Activity" page has already prompted over 3,700 critical comments. And last month after Facebook unveiled a new design, over 1 million members started begging them to return to their original layout, according to USA Today. One Facebook user has even launched a new group just to protest forced web page designs. (A technology analyst explained it this way to USA Today: "There is backlash to change, simple as that.")

It's been an interesting week. "Microsoft isn't the only software company accused of screwing up a user interface," one blogger wrote. But I think there's a larger problem: the way big web companies take their users for granted. "You can dismiss it," Yahoo's Tapan Bhatt tells the New York Times, "which is stupid. Or you can try to understand what it is that users are telegraphing." I think it's a lesson that Xerpi's learned already. As a new kid on the block, maybe Xerpi just has to listen to its users a little more carefully. After all, it's supposed to be a home page of your favorites -- not ours!

"Every time I use my computer, I use Xerpi. And I use my computer every day!"

I asked Xerpi's founder who our #1 fan was — and he pointed me to Ali Lopez.

She's been using Xerpi almost since the day it was started (after hearing about it from the site's founder, Con Way Ling.) In fact, Ali was using Xerpi when I called her, even though she was at work! "That's what's great about it," she says. "I use it everywhere!"

Her home page probably looks a lot like yours. She's got 22 different blocks, filled with nearly 100 favorites. But even when she's at a friend's house, Ali still brings up her favorites on her Xerpi page. "Even when I was in Mexico, I always brought up my Xerpi page," Ali remembers — and that's not all. As she travelled through Mexico, she brought up her Xerpi home page in over 20 different internet cafes throughout the country!

What was our #1 fan doing with Xerpi in a foreign country? "Basically, I'd keep in touch with people," she says. "I'd email my friends and family and that sort of thing and talk on Skype." Xerpi was especially useful because Ali has four different email addresses — and the links are all waiting for her on her Xerpi home page. "There's school email, HotMail, Gmail accounts... If I'm going to check my email, it's easier to have all of them there. It's just really efficient for me!" On another trip, Ali even pulled up her Xerpi home page in Spain!

I asked a few more questions, and discovered that there's a reason why some people crave Xerpi over a giant list of bookmarks in their web browser. "The 'bookmark' system is always very messy for me, because I'm a very visual person," Ali says. "I like to see everything organized in sections.

"So I just added all my stuff to Xerpi — and I just thought it was the greatest thing! I'm on my computer a lot, and Xerpi has everything that I use." Now whenever Ali opens her browser, Xerpi is the first thing she sees. "It makes it really efficient for me... I don't understand why more people don't use it!"

Ali's a graduate student getting a masters degree in community organizing, and her link blocks have everything a student could need — financial aid, yoga, art, weather, religion, movies (And she even created a separate page of links to help with her homework.) But what makes Xerpi useful for Ali isn't a complicated philosophy. In fact, if anything, it's a simple value proposition. "I feel like it works for me," Ali says. "It feels familiar. It's like part of the life of my computer."

I asked if there was anything else she liked about Xerpi, and her answer showed her enthusiasm. "I like the way the logo spells Xerpi with a heart."

And as we talked, Ali suddenly thought of more things she wanted to add to her home page. "I always add things... To me the thing that's great about Xerpi is it's very practical and efficient."

As a final question, I asked if she was excited about Xerpi.

"Of course I'm excited. I love it!"

Seems like there is always new and cool stuff we want to add to Xerpi. But, honestly, I am swamped right now -- I've got a few too many projects going on (more below). So, before I go to my alma mater (UVA SEAS) with "Part-time student help wanted" flyers, I thought it would be best to make the plea to my readers. Of course, the probability that one of the three of you are actually a Computer Science student and/or an HTML/CSS savvy geek type who "gets" things like source code control and development environments is low indeed. I mean, its not like it is even truly random cause I probably already know all three of you and you aren't CS students. :(

Regardless, we are in desperate need of part-time help. However, we do require some rigor and exceptional tech skills for this position. What we can offer is an exciting, edgy set of projects and some moolah. So, maybe this isn't you, but someone you know -- we do think a student is a great fit since we offer flexible hours and work from anywhere and we are sure that the experience and mentoring we offer will be invaluable for those just learning about programming languages, data structures, and algorithms analysis.

So, shoot me an email if you are interested. This is totally fun and exciting work -- it is very rewarding to see your work immediately used as well, we could use some fresh perspective and ideas to add to our queue of enhancements: wray(at)godomedia.com.

What are the many projects? Well, Xerpi's parent company GoDo Media (yes… that's the Global Online Optimization Conglomerate…hahaha) is focusing on our optimization services. Xerpi has been imperative for us to become a real contender in the bookmarks space, but ultimately our expertise is in knowing how to leverage that data in a way to make everyone's surfing experience better and more relevant. Face it, the Internet isn't "for free" anymore. We are faced with a continuous onslaught of ads that help pay for services such as ours -- our mission is to increase the relevance of this experience leveraging anonymous data optimization techniques and ultimately putting the users back in control of their online experience. And that is not intended to be a marketing plug, it is just where we finally are. Come work with us and you can delve into that area too; talking about an ideal real-world application for fourth year and grad school level Systems and Software Engineering folks. So the projects: browser apps, iphone apps, facebook apps, optimization algorithms, systems development (in all the hottest solution-driven languages), web development, etc.

I'm also engaged in other fun projects that are all a part of our desire to test the utility of web-oriented services and figure out the current driving force behind the Web. I mean, the techies are still kind of driving this ship, but there are more and more sites whose simplicity and zero resistance sign-up are catering to the everyday Web users. These folks may not understand much more than simple search anyway. Buttonall (sheesh, here I go again plugging that site on this blog) is a good example. And, I do bring it up, cause you can try it now with a search channel that includes Xerpi search!!

Buttonall with Xerpi Search

And, of course there are all the animals (kids included) that keep things busy and so fun and funny.

I'm so sad the Olympics are over...

I can't remember the last time I followed the Olympics or even a sporting event so closely. It's particularly special for me because I went from planning to boycott the Olympics to being a huge fan. I will continue to find China's approach to human rights and free speech puzzling but have also been reminded an outsider's perspective is always limited. China is developing into a modern country over a period measured in years. Historically this development has spanned decades and centuries for today's developed nations. This rapid evolution is something that's never been done and they are figuring it out -- rightly or wrongly -- on the fly. Anyway clearly another topic.

I ended up going to Beijing at the last minute and it turned out to be one of the most amazingly fun and inspiring times I have had in a long time. I didn't sleep for the first 40 hours after I landed as there were so many amazing things to do. Opening ceremonies, rooftop dancing, opening competitions (badminton, beach volleyball, gymnastics...), etc. I finally fell asleep at a bar and was brought home and put to bed by my friends.

The Chinese people took such amazing pride in putting on an event for the world. Many of the students volunteering were working 12-16 hours a day!. Yet everyone was so happy and excited -- I even enjoyed going through security. They were humbly proud and wanted to share their excitement with the world. It was just awesome.

I flew into Beijing on opening day on a domestic flight. I knew it was going to be a special couple weeks when shortly after takeoff the pilot came on and said, "I want to welcome you to Flight [blah, blah]... This is a big day for my country. Today is the opening of the Olympics and I hope everyone enjoys it." Then the flight attendants opened bottles of champagne spraying them all over the place. Music started playing and everyone was up dancing in the aisles.

One of the songs played was, "Beijing, Beijing, Wo Ai Beijing." The song is so catchy that when I got to Beijing it was stuck in my head but none of my friends had heard it so by the end of the week we were concluding that I must being going mad because we never heard it again.

Well they just played it in the Closing Ceremonies! Yoohooo. I've not gone mad. I've not gone mad. And I've found the song!! What a perfect way to close the games for me.

I saved the song to my profile -- in the block titled 'Random' is a link to Amy Wong's blog where you can hear the song and see the lyrics. Everyone automatically has a public Xerpi profile. You can access it by clicking profile in the top right corner of your Xerpi page. This is also where you can update settings to your email and other information. To do this just click on the pencil in the upper right hand corner of the gray information box.

As for me I am sad these Olympics have come to a close but so thankful and excited by the amazing reminder of the pure joy and inspiration of life, living and dear friends!

"Beijing, Beijing, Wo Ai Beijing." Yoohooooooooooo!!!

So I'm renovating my apartment. Well it's actually dragging on but that is another, boring, story. What is cool is how Xerpi has made it easier.

I'm renovating both my kitchen and and my bathroom so I need to get new faucets, sinks, fixtures, etc. I have architects and contractors all trying to coordinate different needs as I try to find fixtures and things that I like. For awhile we were sending emails with ideas but it was difficult to keep track. So we created a public Xerpi page Mott Renovation. Now we can all add links to fixtures and things while keeping them all organized in one place. It's been cool. I've even noticed some friends have subscribed to the page. I hope one of them gets the Dornbracht RainSky Shower because I really, really want one but besides being worth a lot of chocolate chip cookies if I put one in my dinky studio my whole apartment will be shower.

Oh and with the new Post to Xerpi Bookmarklet it's going to be even easier to save new faucets to this page. Now if there was only a way to save them to Xerpi AND email them. Now that would be cool...

Oh yeah, btw -- finally got the Firefox extension updated to work with FF 3. In fact, the new Firefox "post to" button has been enhanced to match our new "post to" bookmarklet. What is a bookmarklet you say? Or, did I hear you say, yeah, bookmarklet -- where is it? Well, until it makes it into our new help, just copy this link onto your favorites toolbar (in FF and Safari this is just dragging the link up to your browser's favorite toolbar, in IE this is right-clicking and doing the add to favorites thing). Ok, here is the bookmarklet:

Post to Xerpi

If you've been meaning to tell your friends about Xerpi, now may be a pretty good time. We've revamped the signup page and process again. This has actually been a work in progress for some time now as we have been juggling some other upcoming enhancements (mostly based on user feedback, thank you):

Updated bookmarklets that include an improved post-to and *surprise* functionality

Updated FF buttons (that will work on FF 3)

Enhanced FF bookmark import (and export)

More streamlining for sign-up to make users immediately productive

Better help so we can show off all our capabilities

I'll try to make it a better habit of at least updating my blog here whenever any new nuggets are added. And while I'm at it, maybe I'll drag out the ol' soapbox to make my posts a little more entertaining and less marketing.

A secret project? Yes! In a hidden corner of the web, Xerpi's top geek (and chief technology officer) was tinkering away on a digital hybrid combining Google and Yahoo with Amazon and Ebay.

And Facebook. And Craigslist. And MySpace. And Dictionary.com...

In fact, twenty of the web's best sites were magically stitched together in a new super-search engine that just appeared on the web Wednesday! And when the big day came, and one site had collected together the many, there was only one thing to call it.

"ButtonALL."

"There are so many Internet search engines," announced moonlighting Xerpi geek Wray Mills, and he also acknowledged that there's lots of new ways to display search results. But ButtonALL "will be a great place to catch up on what's out there for the average user." In a press release, the site is even described as a universal remote — for the internet.

"ButtonALL simplifies things by consolidating all the most popular search engines and 'Web 2.0' applications into ONE single search page, Mills said in the big announcement. "It saves you time by not having to open new windows and re-starting searches."

And Mills' work on the project drew new attention to his design for Xerpi. "Wray is the Ruby on Rails Rock Star," gushes a post on ButtonALL's blog, acknowledging how Wray's technology skills made Xerpi "one of the best social bookmarking sites on the Internet (more yummy than del.icio.us)."

So after searching the web with ButtonALL, you can search all the the personal favorites that were bookmarked by Xerpi's users — and you'll still be using the great computer coding of geek rock star Wray.

"If you ever wanted a 'favorites' web page with drag n drop functionality that you could access from any computer," ButtonALL's blogger writes, "then you should test-drive Xerpi..."

She's a New York art designer — and a mother of five. In fact, Gabrielle Blair even named her blog "Designing Mom." "[H]er eye for the classical, functional or stylish seeps into every aspect of her life," wrote New York Metro magazine in a profile. Xerpi was about to face an appraisal by a committed professional in the fine art of graphic design.

So what did she think of Xerpi?

"It's like bookmarking on steroids."

As a graphic designer, Gabrielle apparently appreciated the way Xerpi allows the grouping of links "in a visual way" — and also, the ability to customize them!

Gabrille shared her positive review in a post on her blog last month. But maybe this represents a special triumph, because Gabrille told New York Metro that even outside of work, she finds herself approaching life experiences "through the lens of my design training." I've always thought that Xerpi's interface was its own best advocate — and in the end, it looks like it may have won Xerpi yet another convert.

"I've been using del.icio.us for my bookmarks for the last 18 months or so," Gabrille writes. "I use it to keep track of sites I've posted about and sites I want to post about. But I'm thinking about switching to Xerpi.

"It looks like it has a ton more features to help me track things more efficiently..."

This is exciting. Celebrity photographers prowling New York City captured some rare video footage of Xerpi founder Con Way Ling!

The video's a little shaky — maybe it wasn't a real celebrity photographer — but someone's uploaded video of Con Way's presentation at a technology conference called the New York Tech Meetup.

He's not accompanied by Paris Hilton, but Xerpi marketing director Jen Yip is there to explain public views of favorites to the dazzled audience of technophiles. And Con Way triumphed over a restrictive time limit by distilling the essence of Xerpi into a couple clear insights.

"Everything's customizable," he says — names, titles, and even the location of links and blocks — and "it frees you up from the traditional limits of lists of tags"

Someone who was there was apparently impressed with Xerpi's simplicity, calling it "much more mainstream-targeted" than similar sites.

Xerpi's not a secret any more.....

I just noticed something today. Xerpi's developers snuck an extra link onto the sign-in page that lets you spy on Xerpi's top public views. (Back in December Xerpi added a link to the public views at the bottom of each user's page, but now you don't even have to sign in to see the public views.) I guess it's a reminder that Xerpi now houses some grass roots collections of very useful links. But it's also just plain fun to see what the rest of the Xerpi community is up to!

There's lots of people saving lots of favorites — and that hive of sharing is hard to resist. The "all iPhone" view now has 27 subscribers checking in for new iPhone-related links, and it's been loaded over 2,500 times! (And the anime and manga view is over 2,000!) Reading the list I realized that I could probably spend an entire afternoon just checking out all the sites that other Xerpi users have found. Maybe it's tapping one of the dark secrets of human nature. What piques my curiosity more than one of my favorite links? Someone else's favorite links...

There's favorites for everything from home renovation and real estate investing to a page with gambling and wagering sites. The "top public views" page has 20 different collections of favorites to check out — and they've got a surprising amount of variety. There's travel resources for Paris and New York, and even resources for professional dancers and actors. Like the web itself, the public views are always surprising you with strange discoveries that are new, interesting, useful.

But the best part about public views is that you can make one yourself. I like to think that someday I'll discover that the public is just as interested in my favorites as I am in theirs....

"We now have a new reporting system," Xerpi's marketing director told me last month. She crunched the numbers and made an amazing discovery. Xerpi's users have saved over 90,000 favorites!!!

And there's a surprising amount of variety in there. When we dug a little deeper, we learned that over 35,906 different web sites now have a page that's somebody's favorite on Xerpi!

Take a deep breath and think about that number for a second. There are over 100 million web sites in the world (according to numbers reported on CNN a little over a year ago.) If that's true, then Xerpi's users have already pulled off an amazing feat. They've already amassed links to .035% of all the web sites in the world!

Plus, these favorites are scattered across over 12,554 different user-created blocks. And Xerpi's busy user community didn't stop there. They've even created a whopping 6,896 tags — just to describe all the favorites!

I say "Xerpi's user community," but of course I mean — you! These numbers are a reminder that whether you realize it or not, you're part of something larger.

A community — and an ongoing moment in internet history.

High school students are migrating to the online world. A whopping 93% of teenagers now use the internet, a new study shows — up from just 73% seven years ago. (And 61% now say they use it every day!)

But it doesn't end there. Teenagers are also creating more content online. Between the ages of 12 and 17, nearly two-thirds have now created some kind of online content — a full 64%, versus just 57% in 2004.

Here's where it gets interesting. The total percentage of teenagers blogging now is 28% — up from a mere 19% in 2004. But according to the study, "virtually all of that growth...is due to the increased activity of the girls." In fact, teenaged girls are ahead of the boys in creating nearly all kinds of online content.

			Girls	Boys
Blogging		35%	20%
Sharing photos		54%	40%
Creating profiles	70%	57%
Sharing video		10%	19%				

One 17-year-old girl told the New York Times proudly that "I'm not surprised because girls are very creative, sometimes more creative than men. We're spunky!" (And another 13-year-old had a different perspective. "Most guys don't have patience for this kind of thing...")

It's already creating a stir in the blogosphere. The webmaster at "TechMamas" wrote that she'd decided to link the article "as a way to inspire parents to tell their girls to go geek..." (She also complained that the New York Times illustrated their article with Grace Hopper — the female developer of the first computer programming language compiler — and then a picture of Velma from Scooby Doo.) But it could be worse — C|Net apparently felt they couldn't make a list of the top ten girl geeks without including Paris Hilton.

Is society moving towards a big change? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men still outnumber women by nearly 3:1 in computer and math-related jobs, the New York Times reports. But with more teenage girls active online, those statistics could change for the next generation.

"I think there might be a story in this," says Con Way Ling, the founder of Xerpi. After reading the article, he did his own assessment of the patterns he'd seen for Xerpi's ad campaigns. "I've also noticed that females are three times more likely to respond to our ads than males!"

It can't be because there's more women using the internet. (It's almost an even split, according to a poll in March.) And I don't think it's because women respond to Xerpi's ads just because they identify with that woman on the sign-on page who truly loves her favorites...

But maybe some of the extra females are those pioneering teenaged bloggers that the New York Times identified, coming up through the next generation to take the 21st century by storm.

And while they're sizing up the world — they're using Xerpi!

   

It's easy to forget how many people are using Xerpi (since I've filled my page up with my own favorite links). But you can get a sense of how popular Xerpi by searching Google, where you'll find lots of people talking about it on their blogs. Xerpi faced a discriminating audience when a Manhattan-based graphic designer tested its interface. Her conclusion? "I absolutely love it."

New York graphic designer Yaritsa Arenas builds web sites for everyone from fashion stores to electric companies. But when it came to Xerpi, the interface blew her away. "There's more to explore, Yaritsa writes, but "what I've seen so far has really impressed me."

"I highly recommend it."

And Xerpi is fancy, says a web developer named Hank Williams. But "in this case, the fancy is a very good thing."

I like the way Hank describes it. "Everything is very drag and drop...." After setting up his favorite page, he'd reached a conclusion. "Elegant and simple. Well done." But that's been the general consensus in an ongoing online conversation that was started last summer. Some of Xerpi's earliest adopters were saying the very same things. ("Well organized and easy to navigate..." "Extremely easy to use...")

It would probably be egotistical to say "to know Xerpi is to love Xerpi." But I think it's smooth simplicity is hard to miss — and judging from the comments on the web, people seem to agree!

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."

One of my favorite writers was Douglas Adams (who wrote "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and some other very funny science fiction books). A month before he died in 2001, I had the good fortune to hear him speak at a technology conference in San Francisco.

"Life is wasted on the living," Adams had said, and on that day he proceeded to expand our minds with a breezy, sardonic discussion about what he expected from the future. Standing in front of a curtain dotted with reflecting stars, he announced matter-of-factly that "We are participating in a 3.5 billion-year program to turn dumb matter into smart matter." One of the many things he talked about was an enormous data model that could one day contain real-time information about every object in the universe — "a soft earth, alive and developing..."

I thought of that when I heard the news last month that Xerpi's users had already created nearly 7,000 tags just to describe their "Favorites" links. The whole point of tags is to create "meta information" pointing people to appropriate content that's already been discovered. It doesn't do any good to have a web page unless there's an easy way to find it for people who are interested. Ultimately it's the user-created tags that complete the relationship between a web page and its potential readers. They're very simple — but they're also extremely useful.

"We are fed up with 'technology'," Adams had told the audience, "when all we want is 'stuff that works'." He drove his point home by talking about one crucial difference between a cellphone and a chair. "A chair doesn't have a manual," he pointed out, but a cellphone does. ("The manual will tell you how to spend 17 hours programming your phone numbers into it with a match stick.") Adams always showed a great deal of faith in the instincts of humans — and a secret fascination with the progress of technology. "Unlike previous generations, we knew it was going to different," he told the audience. "We just didn't know what it would be..."

Last Tuesday was Douglas Adams' birthday. (He would've been 57.) Seven years down the road, I had to ask myself: what did we realize in this far-away future of 2008? And I realized that we humans are now doing it for ourselves. We're collecting up our own sets of "favorites," and then scattering out a trail of tags — like bread crumbs — so that others can also find their way to them. In some small way, we've already taken that first step into a grand, mysterious future.

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes," Adams once joked.

But at least some of them can be solved with tags.

   

Guess who's the "Top Site of the Day?" Xerpi! A web-reviewing site concluded that Xerpi "is a great site with a great idea."

"Their slogan is 'to make the internet a simpler place,' and they have done just that."

But besides the rave reviews for the concept behind Xerpi, I'm excited that they also liked the finished results! Their reviewer announces that Xerpi "has a great feel and is well organized... You will be very pleased with this site if you are into keeping track of all the great sites you come across..."

And if you watch closely, you can even spot Xerpi founder Con Way Ling making a visit to the comments and sharing his philosophy. ("We want to keep things simple, clean and relevant.") And that's exactly the thing they noticed over at a site called Web 2 New York.

"Xerpi's drag and drop interface is another feature that could set the site apart in the crowded social bookmarking field."

But what's really significant is that everyone's talking about Xerpi. My family's using it, my friends are using it, and at the technology site Center Networks, Allen Stern even did a video review of Xerpi. ("I think I'm pronouncing it correctly...")

Allen says we're like other favorites sites ...but prettier! "It just looks a lot better... Much cleaner, much prettier, etc." And I'd just finished watching him say that Xerpi's public views are "fabulous" when I noticed that Xerpi even drew an enthusiastic response from one of his readers.

"Great! At last a bookmark manager with the possibility to re-arrange individual bookmarks! This is missing in almost all similar services out there.."

And what are they saying at PuntoGeek?

"Una vez importados se muestran en forma de módulos que podemos organizar por pestañas de acuerdo a las temáticas que tengan. Además podemos crear módulos con tags, esto permite resaltar ciertos enlaces de los tags que hayamos especificado. Por ejemplo, insertamos en el título del módulo “Blogs”, luego especificamos unos tags, como “gadgets, internet, internet”, y en ése módulo se mostrarán enlaces que contengan esos tags."

Whoops! I forgot that the internet is an international community. But I ran it through the Spanish-to-English translator at Babelfish, and got a delightfully fractured interpretation.

"Once mattered they are in form of modules that we can organize by eyelashes according to the thematic ones which they have..."

I think the basic message is that with Xerpi, you can organize your favorites by dragging them into blocks — but something got lost in translation.

And another message is that people are trying out Xerpi everywhere. There's a web site called "Killer Startups" in Guatemala — and they liked Xerpi too!

Xerpi.com has an attractive interface; it is simple, but creative and eye catching...

The public views are a nice way of sharing information and favorite sites...

The site is easy to navigate and contains very little clutter...

But out of all the comments we've received, this one is probably my favorite.

The logo with the tiny green heart serving as the dot for the 'i' is very cute!

   

My favorite part about Allen's video review of Xerpi on CenterNetworks was it finally gave me a chance to watch how someone else uses Xerpi! I've always wondered what other people were doing with their views. Were they "clicking through" to other sites on the web — or staying on their home page to re-arrange their favorites.

But then I hit the jackpot. The Xerpi development team shared an interesting observation about the "usage patterns" of Xerpi's users. "When users first start using Xerpi, their site visits are very high, and their 'clickthroughs' are lower," according to Xerpi's marketing director. And the more I thought about it, the more that made perfect sense. The new users are adding favorites to their new Xerpi home pages, and maybe even setting up their first community views.

But what happens then? The development team noticed that once Xerpi's users become more experienced, "their visits per day go down, and their click-throughs go up almost proportionately. (We're assuming that this is probably because they start using Xerpi more once it is set up, and visiting sites more often that they've already saved!)"

And in a way, that's very gratifying. The whole point of Xerpi is to make it easier to visit your favorites. Our data shows Xerpi's users are doing just that. They're creating a home page with links to all of their favorites — and then they start visiting them!

But I have a prediction. Soon Xerpi's developers will start seeing a third wave of "nesting," when these users discover the real power of Xerpi's public views. Once you've set up your own wonderful favorites page, the next logical step is to start sharing those favorites with other users.

Or at least, that's how it worked with me. :)

   

I got an idea from Con Way Ling, the founder of Xerpi. In November he posted on a web log that "We launched about two weeks ago and already have over a thousand users who have set us as their homepage."

But could Xerpi keep on growing? In the middle of December, I asked Xerpi's marketing director, Jen Yip, who told me that Xerpi was getting even more popular. "Signups have been steadily increasing!" she told me excitedly. "When we first launched in November, we were getting a handful of new signups each day, but now we're getting about fifty new signups each day! And we expect that number to keep growing..."

So what happened in January? Last week I checked in with Xerpi's marketing director again, one month later, and discovered that there was even better news. "We're over that magical 2000 mark," Jen told me — and she seemed even more excited.

And it is exciting to be in on the start of a community. I feel like a pioneer, like someday I'll be telling youngsters about "The early days, back in 2008, when people first started realizing that Xerpi could organize their favorites..." It seemed like such an important milestone, I went on a hunt for Con Way Ling, the founder of Xerpi, to see if I could get his reaction.

And within a few hours, there it was in my inbox. The executive summary? "It's been awesome to see all the users who've signed up for Xerpi in the short time since we launched."

But there's more good news, since counting the total number of members is just part of the story. "What gets us even more excited is that many of our users visit Xerpi 30+ times a day!" Con Way told me. And the statistics are just driving the Xerpi team to create more innovative ways to use Xerpi to organize your favorite sites.

"As the sign-up rate continues to grow, with word getting out, we're going to continue working furiously to bring out new features," Con Way announced, "to make Xerpi the best way to love your favorites!"

I'm predicting that 2008 is going to be a great year. Even though thousands of people have already discovered the joy of the site — Xerpi's going to get even better!

   

I give a lot of things to my friends -- gifts, my time, a non-judgmental ear when they are having problems -- and I also give them Xerpi. Why? One of the best ways to me to get the most out of Xerpi is to have people whose judgment and taste I trust on the site so I can learn from them by sharing their links.

And now through March 31, you can benefit from giving Xerpi to your friends by signing up for our "Give it to a Friend" contest. If you are already on Xerpi, you are automatically signed up. If not, go to xerpi.com/play and sign up to win. All you have to do is use Xerpi and you will get points for daily use. And you will also get points for all of your friends' use too. See complete contest rules on the site. You can win $500 or an iPod Touch. Not bad when you are getting organized online at the same time.

See you on Xerpi.

   

Xerpi continues to surprise me with new things! Here's some secret tricks I've discovered when creating link blocks and adding favorites.

Did you know you can...

• Format your favorites
  It's possible to italicize words in the name of a favorite — or display some of the words in bold print! It's the same formatting tags that work on web pages — add <I> before the words to italicize, and </I> where you want the italics to stop! (Or for bold, use <B> and </b>)

• Copy a link block.
  Xerpi lets you create a link block that's filled with nothing but links from another link block!

  Xerpi already lets you move a link block into a different view. (Just hold your mouse over the block's blue title bar. Your cursor turns into crosshairs which let you drag the block onto the view's tab, which creates the copy!) But if the block is on a "public" or "shared" view, Xerpi creates a copy of the block on the second view instead!

  I realized this meant I could copy any block — just by temporarily changing the view that it's on into a public view! Then dragging that block to a different view will create a copy of all its links — and I can drag that link block back to whichever view I want!

• Reverse the order of links.
  There's another interesting quirk I discovered after mistakenly creating a block of favorites in reverse alphabetical order. After I dragged the block over the tab for another view, and then dragged the resulting copy back into my first view...the order of the links had been reversed! This saved me the trouble of having to re-arrange all the links into the right order.

• Hyperlink a Link Block Title.
  It's possible to link to a specific web in the title of a link block. Just put the URL in between "anchor tags," like this!
  <a href=" url goes here "> the word to hyperlink </A>

• Give Your Link Block a Subtitle
  I've seen several people using this trick on Xerpi already. If you want to leave a short description below the title of a link block, just write it as the "title" of the first favorited link.

I guess you learn something new every day!

   

Here's another fun Xerpi view. Each of its favorite links lets you watch full episodes of your favorite TV show! There's 56 different shows, from Desperate Housewives to Heroes to CSI.

All three of the major networks have made at least some of their shows available online. CBS even added four of its daytime soap operas, and ABC is offering high-definition versions of the entire run of Lost. (And for other shows, ABC put up high-density versions of a few selected episodes, including Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, Ugly Betty, and Dirty Sexy Money.)

This is a big deal, even if your New Year's resolution isn't to watch more television! It's a real sign that the web is changing the world. 2008 begins with the television writers still on strike over the royalties they'll receive in the future for online viewings of their TV shows. NetFlix is now letting their users watch movies online. And as Americans begin choosing their next President, they're facing questions submitted in the form of online YouTube videos!

But with all these options available, it becomes even more important to have a site like Xerpi, which lets users create home-grown lists showing where everything is! I typed up a quick "cheat sheet" below of which TV shows are already available online using Xerpi and this new "Free TV" public view. Let this serve as a reminder that we're entering a whole new world. In 2008, we're not just bookmarking our favorite web pages.

Now you can also bookmark your favorite TV shows!

ABC	CBS	NBC
According to Jim	As the World Turns	30 Rock
Big Shots	Big Bang Theory	American Gladiators
Brothers and Sisters	The Bold and the Beautiful	Bionic Woman
Carpoolers	Cane	Celebrity Apprentice
Cashmere Mafia	CSI	Chuck
Dance War	CSI: Miami	Conan O'Brien
Desperate Housewives	CSI: NY	Friday Night Lights
Extreme Makeover Home Edition	The Guiding Light	Heroes
Grey's Anatomy	How I Met Your Mother	Journeyman
Lost	Jericho	Las Vegas
Men in Trees	Kid Nation	Life
My So-Called Life	Moonlight	Medium
Notes from the Underbelly	NCIS	My Name is Earl
October Road	Numb3rs	The Office
Private Practice	Power of 10	Passions
Pushing Daises	Rules of Engagement	Quarterlife
Samantha Who	Shark	The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
Ugly Betty	Survivor: China
	The Price is Right
	The Unit
	The Young and the Restless

   

Happy New Year everyone! At Xerpi, we are really excited about 2008. We've got a lot planned for the site and are very very psyched to get it all out there.

But loving what you do, and what you are working on, doesn't make it any easier to get out of your relaxed holiday pace and back to the office. After the long holiday break including two four-day weekends, I woke up this morning and thought. What? Where? Who?

Luckily, I organize my Xerpi almost like a master "to do" list. Now that the holidays are over, I can delete, or archive some of my gift list blocks, and start adding new ones. Perhaps a 'Resolutions' block? or a 'Research for Resolutions' block?

And, to get back into my work rhythm, I just go to my 'Work' view and start going through my 'Daily Monitoring' and 'Need to Look Into' blocks. I have to say that before my coffee, and especially today I think I do this a bit robotically at first -- but what is that saying? "Fake it, until you make it."

Xerpi helps me fake it, for sure!

   

For Christmas-time, I'm celebrating by decorating my Xerpi home page with pictures!

Instead of the name of a hyperlink, I discovered it's possible to swap in the HTML code for the location of images that are somewhere else on the web. So instead of "The New York Times," I gave my favorite the name

<img src="http://destinyland.org/annette-frankie.jpg">

and my home page displayed the picture!

And then the fun began. It turns out that even animated pictures can be displayed on a Xerpi favorites page. So I scrambled around collecting an assortment of my favorite animated pictures -- like the dancing hamsters, and the jumping banana... Soon I had a glorious hodgepodge of strange internet images, which I'm sharing here as a public view.

Think you can do better? I think so too. But that's the great thing about Xerpi. I got the idea from the public view of Wray Mills, who's the site's official geek blogger. This gave me a warm feeling inside, because it felt like we were all part of the collaborative experiment that is Xerpi. Besides sharing our favorite links, and our favorite pictures, we're also sharing our favorite tricks for getting the most out of them!

I'm imagining where this could lead. Maybe someday there will be a crazy image war, where different editors of a public view take turns re-arranging its pictures, each one placing their own strange favorites at the top of the page.

Maybe Santa's elves could use it to argue about which picture to feature on the North Pole's Christmas card...

   

We've been talking a lot about how Xerpi simplifies planning for the holidays. It's a festive time of year, though, so to express that Xerpi-enhanced simplicity, I decided to try re-writing the lyrics of a popular Christmas song.

Imagine me showing up on your doorstep — bundled up in red and green holiday finery — and singing this song to the tune of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Xerpi, the favorites web page,
had a lot of favorite links.
All of the sites to go for
gifts and fun and food and drinks.

All of the other pages
found themselves in Xerpi's blocks.
Users would share their favorites
in a pretty-colored box!

On a busy Christmas Eve,
Santa's far away.
Xerpi with its links so bright
Helps you plan your Christmas right!

All of the happy users
found the sites they're dreaming of.
Xerpi the favorites web page,
organized their web with love!

Happy holidays, everyone!

Ho ho ho....

   

I can't believe it's the middle of December already - just two short weeks until the new year. Last week, Xerpi made it's New Year's Resolution -- to get Xerpi users organized online in 2008.

And why not get organized online? After all, it can open the door to so many other great changes you can make in your life. One of my personal resolutions for 2008 is to get more organized with my finances. On my main Xerpi page, I've set up a link block with links to some of the best articles I've seen on which documents to save, how to find a great financial advisor, tax law changes, etc. So even if my resolution slips my mind because of everything else going on, the information I need will always be ready and waiting on Xerpi.

Now off to finish some holiday errands!

   

When they say Xerpi simplifies holidays, they're not kidding. I searched Xerpi for the word "Christmas", and found over 75 favorite links!

Try it... If you're shopping for your boyfriend, you'll find links with Christmas Gift Ideas for Men, "Romantic Gifts for Him," and even one labelled "Christmas Presents For Your Boyfriend!"

There's "Gift Ideas for Couples," "Cute Japanese Toys, Dolls & Collectibles," and one that just offers to give you "Amazing Christmas Ideas."

I did a search on Hanukkah, and Xerpi pulled up more holiday links. (One offered to let me "Learn about Chanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights" or "learn the rules for playing dreidel, and a recipe for latkes!")

But what I like best about surfing the web is serendipity — I always find something even more wonderful than what I was originally searching for. Xerpi definitely proved this to me when searching on the word "Christmas." One favorite linked to a web site called "I am bored.com" which was hosting a copy of a hilarious three-minute video promising "the best Christmas lights ever." It shows an amazing house display synchronized with a bombastic electric guitar version of Christmas carols. (I'm just glad I don't live next door to them!)

Xerpi also found a link to some fan fiction for the anime cartoon Naruto titled "What I Want For Christmas." ("She enters, and her seductive innocence floors him so...") There was even a link to a news story called "Syphilis for Christmas," but it didn't seem particularly jolly...

And one link made me really jealous. It told the story a San Francisco geek who received his first Christmas card of the year...from Google! (They sent him a digital photograph frame which even played mp3s!)

I ended up spending over half an hour just clicking through all the interesting links.

But maybe it makes sense. After all, besides giving us a chance to spend time with our loved ones, I've always thought of the holiday as a time for fun surprises.

And I never fail to find a lot of fun surprises when searching Xerpi!

   

By day I work at Xerpi. By night I work on my performance career - acting, dancing, improv. Right now I'm taking a workshop at the Pan Asian Repertory Theater in New York. The workshop is great, and has inspired me to start researching and developing a solo performance work which I am very excited about.

The performance is based on the life of a real person. With any writing and development of this type, there are a lot of materials offline (books, files, records, transcripts) and online (interviews, videos, articles, reviews, pictures, related websites, other links to this person's work) that need to be found and researched. I'm finding Xerpi to be such an invaluable tool while I do this.

I set up a private view for my research, and created blocks for the different types of online sources I am finding. As I expand my research, I find that I can put a lot of the 'offline' material on Xerpi too. Whether it's the website link to a theatrical publisher of a related play I want to study, or a link to directions for an important place in this person's life that I want to visit, it's all saved on Xerpi.

When it comes time to create my reference list for the piece, it will be a snap -- everything will be right there on my research view.

Xerpi, how did I live without you?

   

Xerpi keeps getting better. I just noticed that the bottom of my favorites page has new link called "Public Xerpis." It leads to a web page showing the ten most popular "public" views created by Xerpi's users and user communities!

There's serious views about real estate investing, and fun views about anime — each one filled with several link blocks loaded with relevant "favorite" links. There's even a view for Xerpi's favorite blogs (which ate up a half hour of my morning because I discovered so many cool sites to read...!)

So not only can Xerpi collect your favorites into one easy-to-use location. It's also a way to view collections that are being shared by other users. I predict we'll start seeing people collaborating on the definitive set of links for the topics that spark their passions. As they're scouting the web for even newer and better sites, their public views will get better and better.

I have to mention one special link hidden in the Public Xerpis. (Maybe I should call it "my favorite Favorite"...) There's a public view that's simply called "Metal", with a link block for the headbanging music's record labels, bands, news, and games. I discovered that tucked in the bottom of that view is a special block called "Audio/Visual" delights. And one of its links is a web page full of dark and hilarious drawings of...bunny suicides.


Besides making me laugh out loud, it reminded me how much better web surfing has become in 2007. There's now more ways to discover really great links — links that are someone else's favorites, and link collections that have made it into our selection of the "Ten Best." The best stuff finds its way to the top, carried up from the grass roots by the good will of all its unseen fans — even something as trivial and strange as "Bunny Suicides".

I laughed, I cried, and I fell in love all over again... With Xerpi.

   

I like the name "Xerpi." It's got a mystique to it. (What could it mean?!) It's like a mystery experience that's waiting for you in a hidden corner of the web. Type that magic word into your browser, and it leads to a secret oasis that's full of favorite web pages.

Sometimes I even think Xerpi should be a verb. (As in "Ooh, I love this link so much... I think I'm going to Xerpi it!") I'm not the only one who feels this way. One of Xerpi's earliest users sent us an email saying he likes to "Xerpi" links using his laptop computer at home. With the "Add Content" buttons in his web browser, he sends the URLs into his favorites link block, where they're ready to be reviewed when he gets to work the next day. "I enjoy the ability to find a link while browsing on my laptop at home, then have it waiting for me when I get in the next morning and I actually have the attention span to digest the content!"

I'm tempted to do the same thing — and to use the same words to describe it. I'll Google information about a movie that I want to see after work, but then after I've Googled those web pages, I'll Xerpi them.

To settle this question, I went to the Oracle of Xerpi — or at least, to the woman who handles the official marketing language. "What is Xerpi?" I asked, supplicantly.

"Xerpi is the next generation of social bookmarking," a portentous voice replied. "It's a site that aims to make the internet manageable and personally relevant..."

But wait, there was more. "With new technology that powers a drag and drop interface, Xerpi users can organize and share their favorite bookmarks and design their own internet."

I think the answer's in there somewhere.

If I stop to think about it, there's something revolutionary about surfing the web using a browser equipped with Xerpi's "Add Content" buttons. Besides sending the links back to my own block, I can also share these special web finds with all Xerpi's users.

Xerpi's offering a new technology, and a new activity, and when it all comes together we're ultimately surfing the web in an entirely new way.

Maybe along with that, we're also going to have to come up with some new words to describe it!

   

Every year one of my best friends and I swap 'wish lists' for the holiday. Usually I agonize over it for a while and can't seem to remember anything that I want, then end up sending a list of a few times that I think of on the spur of the monent.

This year is different. Now that I shop with Xerpi I already have a block called "Gifts that People can get for me" where I have been stashing several not-too-expensive items that catch my eye, but aren't necessities that I have already bought for myself.

To get my list to my friend, I created a friends and family view (Clicked the New View (+) button) called 'My Holiday Wish List." I went back to my shopping view and dragged the "Gifts that People can get for me" block over to the new view. Since I planned to share this view with my friend, I renamed the link block "Jen's wish list."

Now I just needed to give editor (so she can add her own list) access to the view to my friend. I clicked the edit (pencil) icon in the view tab, and selected "Friends and Family" next to "Who can see this view?." My friend was already in my friend list, so I clicked on her Xerpi name and then clicked > to move her name into the list of editors for the view. I noted the shared URL for the view at the bottom of the edit dialog box and clicked Update. A quick email to my friend with the shared URL let her add it to her Xerpi page with one click.

Now she can see all of the items I would like. It's her turn to create, or drag a block with her items to the view. Both of us can start our holiday shopping for each other and get to these items with one click. It's so much easier than trading emails or trying to track wish lists saved on multiple ecommerce sites!

   

Hope everyone in the U.S. had a great Thanksgiving, and at the very least, a nice long weekend. We've been really busy at Xerpi, meeting people in New York coffee shops, presenting at Web 2.0 Tech Meetup, and basically spreading the word.

But now Thanksgiving has passed, holiday decorations have gone up and Christmas carols are playing everywhere. ‘Tis the season for gifts, family, travel, cooking and a general state of frenzy and overwhelm.

Xerpi can make the holiday season a bit more manageable this year. Xerpi stores and organizes important links and bookmarks, from your sisters flight home to your office secret Santa's desired gift, mom's potato latke recipe to your online holiday radio station, the family wish list, the holiday decorating article you've been meaning to read, your kids' favorite Christmas cookie recipe and more, all on one easy to use, personalized Xerpi page that is accessible from any computer.

Xerpi lets users create category blocks to store links, as opposed to long lists, making things organized for even Mr. Claus himself, who could drag and drop links between the naughty and nice block, if he so desired.

The site's community views also let users publish their page to share with friends, family or the entire online community, so that anyone can add, change or edit links as they need, while the mobile feature lets users access their favorites from any handheld device for on-the-go browsing.

Getting organized, at least online, does not need to be a New Year's resolution!

   

You'll notice that there's another a new link at the bottom of Xerpi home pages now that's called simply "Press." I thought it was fun to read a little bit about the people who helped build Xerpi.

And what I especially liked was it included some interesting personal details about the Xerpi team. It strikes the right tone, because ultimately Xerpi is just people — you, me, them — and all the links that we love. (Plus the web site that lets us save or share those links...)

Anyways, I thought I'd share some of the interesting tidbits I learned about the founders of Xerpi.

Did you know....

• Xerpi's CEO Con Way Ling has also been a professional dancer, "and previously danced with the Martha Graham Ensemble!"

• Marketing Director Jen Yip came to Xerpi from Sun Microsystems, and has worked as a professional dancer, actor, and model!

• Co-Founder Will Becker studied at Oxford University, and received a first class honors degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

• Xerpi's Chief Technology Officer Wray Mills lives "on a small farm in Virginia with his wife, two daughters, ten horses, five dogs, and seven cats!"

By the way, Wray's been keeping a special "Xerpi Geek" blog which you can see linked at the left of this page. In his last post, he asked users to email any suggestions they might have for how to improve Xerpi.

I am anxious to hear not just what you like about Xerpi, but what you don't like and any ideas you have for making it better. In fact, I am looking forward to getting completely overwhelmed with emails so we can start a Xerpi user mailing list and/or discussion board.

See? Xerpi really is all about the people...

   

Come see Xerpi co-founder Con Way Ling present Xerpi at the next Web 2.0 Meetup in New York.

When: Tuesday, November 20, starting at 6.00 pm
Where: Gallery Bar, 120 Orchard Street between Delancey & Rivington, New York, NY

See more details about the event on the Web 2.0 site.

Say "hi" to us and have a drink!

   

It's like a fairy tale, but it's true.

Paolo DiVincenzo lives in North Carolina, where his company makes the special slips worn with wedding gowns. ("Soft taffeta...with multiple layers of gathered tulle...") And there's an equally special line of jewelry for weddings. They're in over a thousand bridal stores around the world...

Somehow, Xerpi is a part of the mix. Ultimately Paolo created a Shared View on Xerpi filled with all the links that his team needs. "I like knowing that any of our employees have access to the links to check in on the business while they're away," says Paolo. "And their email!"

To find the magical materials that eventually become wedding wear, Paolo works with over 50 companies scattered across the planet — so every day his team checks their web sites for ordering numbers, new products, and sometimes even their inventory levels. Paolo arranged all the links into dedicated blocks, which makes them much easier to find.

And that was just the beginning. For example, another block links to all Paolo's own wedding apparel sites. This block also has links for shipping terms and other information to answer question quickly. And there's another block for "administration" links, which let his team enter orders, update their product listings, and, yes, even access the company's email remotely. If a call comes in about a specific ad, Paolo's team can just go to an "Advertising" block of links and pull up that specific offer. He's even created a special link block for his team that's filled with the latest articles about the industry, along with key data and useful market information.

Anyone who's ever been part of a wedding party knows that it involves an almost endless amount of preparation — and Paolo knows it too. When wedding season hits, it's vital that Paolo's company has all their materials ready, and it's the "Established Suppliers" block lets his whole team access the 50 supplier links for placing orders. A second block also lets Paolo save URLs for possible future suppliers that he needs to research. (Sometimes Paolo finds these links when he's surfing the web at home on his laptop!) "We find a link once, we 'Xerpi' it, and then we all have access to it, indefinitely. It's simple!" Paolo said in an email.

"Xerpi helps ensure that important information is not falling through the cracks. We can get to our suppliers' web sites easily, and we can access market data we've discovered." But there's also one last link block that's popular with his team. It's called "Water Cooler."

"It's fun stuff we find that we want to share."

It's pretty common in the workplace for people to use the same URLs — but what's not so common is having the ability to collect them all together into one shared place. "How many times have you dug through your email archive to find a link someone sent you?" Paolo asks. "It's a terrible time waster!"

So when he finally discovered Xerpi — it was love at first sight.

How do you use Xerpi? Send us an email!

   

There's a lot of excitement at the Xerpi offices this week. Yesterday, we officially released our community views feature and now we are getting ready for our coffee shop event tomorrow, between 2-4pm.

If you will be in Manhattan, come meet co-founder Con Way Ling, learn about Xerpi, and get a free cuppa Joe while you're at it. Official invitation and details below. Hope to see you there!

******

Do you have too many videos, articles, social networks, email accounts, gym schedules, items to get to 'someday' and sites you can never remember online?

At Xerpi, we think browsing the internet should be as simple as having a cup of coffee.

We're a free website you can use to customize your own internet -- with all of your favorite bookmarks in one place -- making the internet manageable and personally relevant. It's free, and it's easy to set up. We'll even do it for you. If you bring in your lap top we'll go one step further by importing all of your bookmarks

Let us buy you a cup of Joe and show you what we mean. Caffeine and organization at 17 Bleecker — 17 Bleecker Street between Bowery and Lafayette St (6 train to Bleecker) on Thursday, November 15th between 2pm and 4pm. It’s a cozy neighborhood café with great coffee, pastries, food, and free Wi-Fi.

Brought to you by Xerpi.

   

Yes, it rhymes with herpes, but don't let that scare you. The name was born in a moment of frustration when Xerpi co-founder Con Way Ling came to the realization that every possible URL on the planet was taken.

Xerpi (pronounced zer-pee, think 'Z' like 'xylophone') is not an STD. It is a ridiculously easy to use Web site that will definitely revolutionize the way you process information on the Internet. Sounds dramatic, I know. Sounds like iGoogle or MyYahoo, you might say. Well, sort of, but not really. It doesn’t replace the sites you already use, but instead provides a better way to use the Internet.

Xerpi in a nutshell is this: simplify your day and transform your life by capturing useful information in a central location for later action/consumption/review/research. Catalog that information in an organic way that is natural to you and share it with others – if, and when you want – and tap into the wealth of cool stuff already tagged for you by like-minded users. (For a spot-on example, check out Wray’s hilarious post on how Xerpi helped bring his technologically-challenged mom into the 21st Century.)

In short, you can use Xerpi in your personal and business life to:

• Save those long-ass articles your smarty-pants friends send you from Salon and the New York Times Magazine
• Keep that link to the newest picture of hot action David Beckham (you may want to share it later with some of your less enlightened friends!)
• Save all the links to your webmail and other accounts in one place for easy access on the road
• Bookmark the fancy pocket knife you want to get your brother for his birthday

Xerpi’s newest feature, Community Views, allows you to publish your favorites (including those obscure, insider travel site -- here's one on Paris) to your friends or the whole world if you are just that crazy. I must say, it’s pretty kick ass – and that's not a phrase a proper Midwestern girl like myself usually says, so don't take it lightly.

Try it and see for yourself how quickly Xerpi spreads – and how quickly you develop a burning desire for more. Once you see the love, spread it. Your friends will be happy to catch it (I just can’t resist the herpes puns here!). Seriously though, I love Xerpi almost as much as I love The Wire, but don't even get me started on that.

   

I told my friend Richard about Xerpi — and he surprised me with an unexpected treat.

Richard's a big fan of the Beach Boys, and "Xerpi" does sound a little bit like the word "surfing." So this morning I checked my email, and there it was.

A song parody that Richard had written that was all about Xerpi, and sung to the tune of the Beach Boys' song, Surfin' USA....

If everybody had a notion,
Across the USA,
Then everybody'd go Xerpi
Just like my good friend Dave!

You'll see 'em saving their web sites,
Searching for new ones too.
And sharing all of their favorites.
Xerpi USA!

You'll catch 'em making their link blocks,
And a Community View
Where everyone can add favorites
or find a page that's new.

All over the web, now
Send bookmarks back to their page!
Everybody's gone Xerpi
Xerpi USA...

We're saving our favorite pages
arranged in pretty squares,
Or matching our favorite tag words
to yours, mine, and theirs.

You'll see 'em linking to Google
And dictionaries, too!
Everybody's gone Xerpi
Xerpi USA.

We'll all be planning out a block
We're gonna fill with links
Of sites to surf or go shopping,
places to meet for drinks...

Even out with our cellphones
we'll take our bookmarks away!
Tell the browsers it's Xerpi
Xerpi USA.

I can almost hear the backup vocals now.

They're singing "Favorites, favorites, U.S.A..."

Ah Flamenco - the music, the culture, the dancing! We have some very flamenco-oriented Xerpi'ites (or is it Xerpians?) who have created a Flamenco Community Page with the best and hottest flamenco information out there. Check it out for flamenco events, videos, class schedules, performers, and information around the US, and around the world!

Barbara Chan is the Xerpi Flamenco community owner. She has been studying flamenco for over 15 years, has made numerous educational trips to Spain, and runs the New York Flamenco Dance Workshop Calendar. Her calendar enables everyone who is 'anyone' in the NY flamenco world to track all of the visiting professionals from Spain, and her site gives a wealth of information on flamenco happenings in NY and beyond.

It's having great insiders like Barbara building our Xerpi communities that make our community views so strong. What community would you like to build?

Coffee has been on my mind lately. Probably because we are planning a great Xerpi coffee shop event in Manhattan -- stay tuned for details. You'll be able to meet founder Con Way Ling in person, hear all about Xerpi, get great online organization tips, even get help setting up your Xerpi -- and the coffee will be on us. Can't wait to meet more current and future Xerpi users!

Back to coffee, or rather, coffee shops. Because I don't live in Manhattan, but work there, I often find myself with pockets of time to spend in the city which are too short to allow a round trip subway trip home, and too long to lurk comfortably in the lobby of my next appointment. Finding a place to spend these pockets of time, and get some work done can be a challenge.

Today on CupofNYC I found this amazing list of coffee shops in NYC with free wifi. I've saved this link on my Xerpi mobile block so I can get to it on my Treo, whenever I need to find a place close to me at that moment. As of today, they list 52 places and they update their listings all the time. While you're there, check out the rest of the site for interesting reviews and information on the NYC coffee scene. I put the link to the main site on my Xerpi 'New York Food' link block.

Now all I need to do is grab my trusty PowerBook and head out the door in the morning, knowing that I can be productive if I need to be before I get home. For me, that is a little more peace of mind.

It's here! The official launch date of Xerpi!!

Xerpi is now a real boy instead of a talking wooden puppet. Or something like that....

Along with the official launch comes a press release with a cool official quote from Xerpi's founder, Con Way Ling. "We designed Xerpi to be a clean, intuitive site that saves time and in the process makes life — at least online — easier!"

Now if Xerpi could only help me find my missing car keys. (I wish I could bookmark them...)

I learned something I didn't know from the launch press release. Apparently Xerpi was originally called "Go Do" when it was first launched in the UK in 2004...

But what happens now that we've officially launched in the United States? Well, Xerpi continues being intuitive, elegant, and easy to use. A lot of the post-launch action happens behind the scenes. Xerpi insiders are spreading the word to the media as we speak.

And I'm spreading the word to my friends. I asked my friend Meredith to give Xerpi a try, and she wrote back with a nice little surprise.

I like it already because the "i" in "Xerpi" is dotted with a heart. I love stuff like that!

See what happens when you tell your friends about Xerpi?

Six months of using Xerpi, and I never even noticed the little heart....

When I first saw this movie, I wanted to believe it was real. That somewhere there's a cute young office worker, and she's using our video contest to share an important message with the world...

How Xerpi solved her frustration with her loser boyfriend Doug!

But it turns out for this entry came from one of the big guns -- a multimedia designer who works at a big accounting firm by day, and in his spare time focusses on making movies. "My current project is a documentary about a facility for severely handicapped children in Illinois," says Lou Gabriel, "and the issues they deal with getting their funding."

"It's a very compelling story," Lou told me this week, "one that I'm determined to tell. I entered the Xerpi.com contest to raise the funds I need to complete the documentary..."

Our first place prize should help get you started...

Congratulations, Lou!

Oh my gosh! It's cartoon cavemen — and they're using Xerpi!

I'm proud to present the first winner in the "Use Xerpi" amateur video contest!
The homegrown video shows someone who looks a lot like my favorite cartoon caveman — Barney Rubble — surfing the web at a stone-age desk (complete with a computer). A big caveman named Fred — er, "Frank" — brags that thanks to Xerpi, "I'm slippin' through cyberspace like a pterodactyl on marsh grass!" After a little trouble pronouncing the word "Xerpi," his friend "Barry" delivers his final verdict. "Sounds fantastic!"

"I can never remember the gosh-darn URLs..."

Behind this funny video is a Florida animation enthusiast named John Hill, who decided to enter the contest because "it gave me an excuse to make a cartoon!" And to give his video added realism, John even brought in the real Fred Flintstone!

Sort of. Both characters got their voices from 52-year-old actor Gregory Neff, who played the famous cartoon caveman in several live shows at Universal Studios Florida. "I've always been a fan of the Flintstones and the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons," says John. "So 'the Tubestones' is my homage to the Flintstones!"

To bring it all together, John used an animating software called Anime Studio. But the more we talked, the more I realized that John isn't just a Xerpi-loving filmmaker — he's also a Xerpi user! "My Xerpi links include the Anime Studio forum — a great place for anyone wanting to learn the program — and the web-log of John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren and Stimpy.

"And of course, my own blog!

John's video is a great way to start the winner's showcase for our Use Xerpi Video Contest — and John's a very good sport. When we contacted him before the judging, he wished good luck to all the other film-makers who were getting ready to dive into Xerpi's video contest, and added that "I'm very excited."

John won second place. So be sure to check back here on Friday to see the amazing first place winner in the great Xerpi video contest!