I received my invite to the Xobni beta from Dan Gilleland who I can see from my Xobni profile likes to send me messages right at 7 or 10 AM. You know, that's great information to know if I'm planning on calling Dan out of the blue to talk.
Xobni (pronounced Zob knee) installs as a side-bar in Outlook and the best way to describe it is a social networking, personal data miner, productivity enhancement, or an SNPDMPE. The tool indexed my oversized pst file in less than 30 minutes and I was up and running in no time.
The side-bar makes it easy to quickly find
- Contact Info - Xobni automatically parses the contents of your email messages looking for phone numbers, email addresses and other contact information. This information is then easy to see at the top of a profile.
- Contacts (Dan's Network) - pulled through the email threads you've exchanged with Dan or where Dan was listed either as a CC or a BCC
- Conversations - View a list of all past conversations, both outgoing and incoming.
- Files Exchanged - Quickly view a list of all files exchanged with Dan in one easy to find list.
One of the great features of Xobni is the built in search indexing which makes looking up information really fast. Yes, I realize there are two great search products our there from Microsoft and Google, but Xobni combines the search interface with social networking and other productivity enhancements in a way that's intuitive and easy to learn.
Another great feature is the analytics interface1 which will no doubt cause a slight drain in productivity when the millions of slightly OCD technophiles see this for the first time.
My hat's off to David and the other UX guys at Xobni for creating a product that takes an amazing amount of data and presents it in an way that's intuitive and highly discoverable.
1
With the Xobni anlytics tool, you can slice and dice your email database in thousands of different ways and the most amazing aspect of the interface is the speed. Basically, this is a BI portal for your inbox. Fun Fun Fun!