Home, home on the page

During a bout with insomnia, invoked by the foolhardy move of beginning to play with my iPad around midnight, I came to a realization that after hitting nearly 15 sites, I had yet to encounter a 'real' homepage. Instead, I was surfing between installed applications, or going from social induced link to link.

As an investor in PlumWillow, I was looking at various commerce affiliates who sell or promote apparel from brands. When on their sites, you search for an item of interest and are most often sent to the brand site to complete the purchase. As I was in browsing/learning mode, this just kicked off another round of browsing and hitting various promotions which sent me to 'personalized' inducements to buy various products.

With my eyes wide open, it was time for news surfing. I now usually do this via applications installed on my device which offer a customized (David Rosenblatt ex-Doubleclick called it a 'curated') experience. On a PC I tend to go from homepage to homepage, but on Apple mobile devices, I go from personalized application to application. It's a different, and for me, a much better experience.

With eyes reddening, I turned to the social 'link' sites, Facebook and Twitter for a more micro perspective of what's happening and to whom. This brought to mind a statistic that I have not verified but will repeat. Supposedly, the head of commerce at Walmart said that 30% of his traffic never sees his home page. I believe that, and think that this number will only rise as sites optimize/personalize to give their visitors a better experience...and themselves more revenue/time.