Xobni Revamps Inbox: Adds Social Networking Twist to Outlook
Based on the premise your Outlook inbox is in desperate need of a revamp a company called Xobni has introduced a free beta version of a program designed to turn Outlook on its head. The application, called Xobni (inbox spelled backwards), is an Outlook plug-in that not only indexes your inbox for searching but also turns Outllook into a kind of social networking utility that can identify links between e-mail recipients.
Xobni mines e-mails in Outlook and pulls key pieces of information out of messages such as (names, phone numbers, and addresses) and organizes them into a what the company says is a highly intuitive sidebar. Take, for example, an e-mail correspondence you had with a co-worker. Click on one e-mail from that person and the sidebar opens an information-rich profile for your contact. You will see conversation statistics (such as how often you communicate with this person and when), phone numbers, other people in the contact's network (those who have been cc'd on earlier messages), previous and current e-mail threads, appointments, and a list of all attachments that person has sent you.
The wonderful part is that Xobni compiles all of this information for you. Even better, you can always hover over a piece of information, such as the phone number, to see the message that Xobni pulled the data from and if you don't like it, change it.
Xobni's search function is cool as well, but if Xobni is doing its job right you'll seldom use it. The whole point of the plug-in is to eliminate the need for searching at all. Instead of waiting for Outlook to find an attachment from six months ago, you simply scroll down a list of all attachments your contact has sent you until you find what you are looking for.
Xobni is such a simple idea, but it is sure to radically change how you handle email. Xobni is only available for Outlook at the moment, but the company plans on expanding to other mail clients in the future.
Check out the Xobni's video demo of its application at work.
CREDIT - PC World contributor Ian Paul
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Xobni sounds interesting...have you seen the Outlook productivity tools developed by a company called TechHit? pretty cool stuff (including some social networking-related programs linking Outlook to Twitter and Facebook) that seems to be spreading like wildfire, at least here in the Bay Area......