Those Xobni guys are ballsy

Yes, this is a good direction for Xobni to go in, and they're already making moves in this direction with the Yahoo! Mail "leak". There is great value in aggregating a user's contacts and relationships across accounts, and being a central platform for relationship management.

> 2. Produce an email client themselves when their value proposition gets good enough.

I doubt it. Their core competency is email analytics, and there's not really a reason for them to create their own email client. Why create Xobni webmail and get a 10% market share of power users, when you can create a Xobni plugin for Outlook, Yahoo, hotmail and Gmail and get over 50% of email power users. Eventually Xobni will expand beyond power users.

> 3. Don’t build a social network, just make email fun to use and make it easy for people to see what their email graph looks like.

Yes, it's fun, but that fun is hard to monetize. This could be a cool feature, but not the focus of Xobni's efforts.

> 4. Become the all-in-one contact threshold tool, and by that I mean users should be able to see their activity across all aspects of communication and set personal alerts for when their interaction level with somebody drops below or goes above a certain level.

Becoming the all-in-one contacts & relationships management tool? Yes. But, I think the idea of completely automating interactions with "Level 1" and "Level 2" contacts is taking it a bit too far. Being genuine is hard to fake, and Xobni shouldn't try to fake that.

> 5. Sell employee analytics to HR departments via the huge amount of mailbox data that they can parse and interpret.

Lots of potential here. The value is less in the data, and more in the interpretation -- HR departments aren't statistical consultants. One option would have to develop a consulting arm to maximize the value here. Another, more scalable, option would be to develop a killer product that does the analysis for the employer.

> 6. Attack other verticals on the local machine

Maybe. But there's more money in email analytics than in file system, IM or iTunes analytics. As for gathering data from other consumer activities, email is still a far from solved problem (and offers far more valuable data). Let Xobni focus on that!

This has been mentioned before: http://mattmaroon.com/?p=361

I thought that whole pine thang was an April Fool's joke... Was I fooled, or were you?

I would make email a platform; as in, make it easy to develop apps for e-mail.

Like To-do lists, contact lists, crm's, etc...