Sunday, May 11, 2008

Can you say 'Xobni'?

Neither could I. Xobni (pronounced zob-nee) is 'Inbox' spelt backwards, and has been hailed by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as the 'next generation of social networking'.

At first glance Xobni looks like yet-another-desktop-search-engine, much like Google Desktop and Windows Desktop Search. A second glance would prove all the difference.

Officially, Xobni is an Outlook plug-in 'that helps you organize your flooded inbox' (which doesn't say much).

While indexing your email Xobni will group contacts you email together much like the way Facebook and LinkedIn do. It will provide you with information on who this contact 'networks' with (based on the people he Cc's when emailing you), how many emails you have exchanged with each contact (in and out) and will even rank your contacts based on the number of emails you send.

Xobni will even let you know how many 'conversations' you have had with a particular contact and what files you exchanged with him/her.

Xobni will even attempt to associate telephone numbers with contacts based on 'signatures' and other algorithms and will allow you to call them using Skype. Whenever you click on an email (to read or preview it) Xobni will immediately provide you with the most relevant information for the person who has sent you the email.

Microsoft seems to have been interested in Xobni, but were turned down, price issues (rings-a-bell?). Xobni are planning versions for different email applications / services, but right now, its only for Outlook. Remember, its still in beta.

Enjoy!

Links:

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

As the words of my pessimistic friend "Too good to be true".
I will sure download the beta and try it out as I am drowning in my inbox.
Another useful post Bashar..

Mazen Abu Ali said...

I'm glad to hear that Omar Shraim's inbox has become loaded, that is too good to be true!

Otherwise I won't imagine that he would need any help for managing emails and contacts of Raed X and Raed Y.

Mazen

Anonymous said...

My mailbox is 2 Gig in size (spare me the lecture) and the Xobni indexing caused my Vista machine with plenty of memory to crawl. It shows some cool stuff, but after a week I was saying "so what?".

Xobni has been uninstalled.

Unknown said...

My mailbox is MORE than 2 Gigs in size, and yes I have faced performance and memory utilization issues when first using Xobni, but only while it was indexing.

Did you install Vista SP1? It should help with any performance related issues (to some extent).

If you want I'll contact the Xobni team directly, but I'll need additional info from you.

Fadi Atteya said...

bashaaar what is this maan my name and you start using me as you testing enviroment with no permission :)
great post man
keep up

thank you
fadi atteya

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