Xobni – the social extension of Outlook™

While reading my usual feeds, I came across this wonderful add-in for Outlook introduced in NY Times article.- “Xobni” (it’s funny that it is the word  “Inbox” spelled backwards )

Xobni basically claims itself as a Email Search tool, much like Windows Search and GDS. But it is very much more than what it says it can do. People call it “Next generation of social networking”, etc.

When I installed it the immediate change I appreciated was it worked on ‘cached exchange mode‘. Then quite intelligently even while indexing it showed lot of interesting facts like my frequently mailing friend, my fastest replier and gathered everyone in my network into a list and started ranking them based on recent conversations. yet, it didn’t stop there, since I was working it was good enough to tell me that it would index the rest of my mail (those present in the local archive folders) in later time.

One of cool thing to note is the interface it has. The Xobni itself installs as a side bar in the outlook mail box, with various sections which includes Email analytics (frequency of mails received), Phone numbers (yes, it actually extracts phone numbers from the email), network contacts, past conversations and files exchanged in the mails. Apart from extracting individual statistics, Xobni can also give a complete analytics for the mail communication like average response (reply) time, mail traffic graph, etc…

Well so much for it’s additional features, but the search itself is quite impresive, enabling me to just view the message within the sidebar and do all my work within that space on the search lists.

You should take a look at the product video for a tour of all it’s features. They have launched a public beta just now. An old news but need a mention here: even BillG demoed Xobni in last Office Dev Conf during February, 2008.

I think this is worth a try! Hope the guys at xobni will keep on innovating!!