InsideMicrosoft

Xobni: Turn Outlook Into A Social Network

Xobni is one of the cool startups to come out of the TechCrunch 40 conference, and after installing their software, I’ve come off pretty impressed. Xobni produces a free Outlook add-in (Xobni is inbox backwards) that appears as a sidebar while reading emails in Outlook.

The sidebar analyzes all your previous conversations with that contact, pulling out that person’s phone number from email signatures (if you don’t already have it) and linking the number to Skype so you can call that person. It also builds a list of people connected to that person (based on CCs and forwards), previous emails you’ve gotten from that person, and a list of files you’ve received from that person, as well as tracking who your most popular contacts are, what time they tend to email you, and how much you’ve been emailing back and forth lately.

All in all, there’s a lot of power here, and a lot of smart touches (like the fact that when you click on a past email, it opens in the sidebar, not taking you away from your current email). I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way to see a list of your most popular contacts (currently, it just shows you a number when you click on an email, and I’ve only found my #7).

You can get a list of people you haven’t talked to into a while and it thinks you should get back in touch with. There’s a seperate analytics area it opens up that shows you how long it takes you to respond to emails (I’m up to 18 hours!), summaries, mail traffic, stats on your unique contacts over a period of time and other things.

There’s a lot of good stuff in there, and if you’re always looking for ways to improve Outlook, or you’re just bad at keeping track of your social relationships, be smart and go check it out.

Xobni runs on Outlook 2003 or 2007, and requires a beta invite code, which you can sign up for here.

Here’s a YouTube video of Xobni:

I’m also playing around with TechCrunch 40 winner Mint, a finances tracking site. I recommmend it as well.

September 20th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | OneNote, Applications | 2 comments