Xobni

Posted on May 7, 2008

A startup called Xobni has just released a new, free plug-in for Microsoft Outlook that aims to help make email more searchable and more social. Xobni — which is inbox spelled backwards — appears as a collapsible, vertical sidebar situated on the right-hand side of the Outlook window.

The software’s main function is search, and it does that very well. In tests, it has been shown to be even faster than Windows own Desktop Search.The company was begun on the premise that Google has indexed all the public-based information, but that some private-based information like Outlook either was not searched or searched properly by the available tools.

Xobni makes Outlook more functional by presenting email as threaded conversations, by organizing attachments, and by extracting and making visible useful information like phone numbers.

Right now, people have to go and dig through a separate folder that has all their contact information for someone. Xobni avoids this by making email social. It scans through your email to find connections between senders and recipients. From that, it exposes latent social networks without requiring users to declare who their friends are or having to invite them into a social network.

For profit, the company plans to offer a premium version of its software to businesses. All the premium features have not yet been nailed down. Company officials also said that Xobni was likely to seek revenue from businesses by offering to connect Outlook analytics data and contacts to other popular business communications tools like Saleforce.com.