A Wider Net

UPDATE 7/308 - see below

I love it, I hate it, and it’s my favorite Outlook plugin. The Xobni toolbar scans all of my email, including all of my old Outlook PST files dating back almost 10 years, amounting to nearly 100GB of data, and makes it astonishingly easy to find things. More than a simple indexing search, Xobni allows you to identify social networks within your email structure by helping you identify frequent connections, conversational threads, topics, etc. Conversational threads become far easier to find and read. For each person, sender or recipient, you get an at-a-glance profile of how often you send and receive mail to that person, what conversations you’ve had recently, who else has been involved in the conversations with this person, and what files you have shared. You can even tell what time of day they are most likely to send email and divine the best times to reach them! They also provide detailed analytics so you can look into your own email habits, how long it takes for you to respond to emails, how many emails you get and receive each day, and so on.

Xobni has been a bit of a system hog, resulting in about 10 minutes of frustrating startup in the morning when keyboard response frequently drops from “snappy” to “10-year-old-cat-who-is-proudly-ignoring-you”. Today, that appears to have taken a big step in the right direction with the release of version 1.4 which contains, among other improvements, performance boosts. I could not be more thrilled by any incremental release of a plugin. Ok, I could… and I’m talking to YOU del.icio.us.

The biggest addition in version 1.4 is the integration with massively useful business social network LinkedIn. Thank the social network gods that they chose LinkedIn over Plaxo because my Plaxo profile simply says “Find me on LinkedIn”. Xobni now pulls in updated information from LinkedIn for any of your contacts within your email thread, including photo, company, and phone number. Have you ever attended a meeting with seven people you’ve never met, only to get home and not remember which person was which? Oh man, that happens to me all the time and this feature is my foggy brain salvation! Hopefully more people will add photos to LinkedIn now. Outlook just got a lot more useful!

Update 7/3/08 - Xobni now sucks down my processor constantly. I can’t type a single email or word doc or blog post without constant pauses and delays. I recommend staying away from this new version for a while, based on my experience