Xerpi Blog - Home

CS students wanted

2008-08-27T13:24:00Z

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.

2008 Beijing Olympics Closing

2008-08-24T12:01:00Z

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!!!

Xerpi Renovates

2008-08-22T00:01:00Z

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...

FF buttons, new bookmarklet

2008-08-21T02:43:00Z

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

New signup -- tell your friends

2008-08-13T21:50:00Z

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.

Xerpi Geeks Conquer the Web

2008-07-15T17:08:00Z

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..."

Xerpi's Newest Fan

2008-07-07T06:21:00Z

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..."

Everyone Loves Xerpi

2008-06-12T20:02:00Z

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!

Xerpi's Paparazzi

2008-06-06T00:45:00Z

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.....

We Are Not Alone

2008-05-21T00:00:00Z

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....

Celebrating 90,000 more favorites

2008-04-28T16:21:00Z

"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.

Xerpi and The Next Generation.

2008-04-15T09:05:00Z

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.

			<u>Girls</u>	<u>Boys</u>
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 movie 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!

Remembering Douglas Adams' birthday

2008-03-28T13:29:00Z

"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.

Everyone's Talking!

2008-02-26T15:42:00Z

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!

The World Beyond Xerpi

2008-02-19T19:09:00Z

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. :)