the blog

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. :)