The statistics and analytics features serve (IMHO) as initial attraction hooks. For example, a lot of people I know went to GMail because of the 1GB space thing

The statistics and analytics features serve (IMHO) as initial attraction hooks. For example, a lot of people I know went to GMail because of the 1GB space thing rather than all the revolutionary features inside. They discovered all the goodies only as they started using it. I think a similar thing happens with the colorful graph that Xobni shows. If you think about it, nobody would give a damn about what that graph is showing. But as Gabor points out in the article, if I am passing by, that's the first thing I'd get attracted by. It just looks really really spiffy.