Inbox 2.0 isn't coming, it is here.

At the risk of getting downvoted due to a negative-sounding comment, I must say that I don't find Xobni's plugin so useful (at least to me) by what I've read about it. I use Outlook at work and Gmail for my personal email, and I think that the main feature that's missing from Outlook is good search. All the other features that Xobni provides sound, like, well, features. Just because my emails my contain implicit information about my "social graph" (whatever that means), it doesn't mean I care about it in my daily work. All I want from Outlook is to give me a decent search feature like Gmail and I'll be happy. It's great that Xobni provides better search than Outlook, but that's not enough to get me excited about the rest of the product. I certainly don't see myself using a plugin that "enhances" my Gmail experience -- it's already quite good as it is. Gmail is my inbox 2.0. It came out a couple of years ago.

The thing about Xobni is that as much as I like it (having been doing interesting things with email for a very long time) and I think they are right to focus on Outlook (since it sux0r), I can't help thinking that Xobni is a _feature_ and not a company.

Perhaps the Xobni guys can talk about what makes them think that it's a stand alone company? Perhaps the answer is that they don't, perhaps they just hope Microsoft will buy them.

John.

so xobni's an outlook plugin, right? why not write xobni's frontend in javascript (that a bookmarklet downloads), so that you can have the xobni experience in ie/ff when browsing gmail.

It's actually pretty easy to try out Xobni if all your email is in gmail. Using gmail's recent IMAP feature add, you can set up Outlook to check your gmail account, and then try Xobni without having to leave gmail.

While outlook's support for imap is pretty sketchy, at least this is a way for interested gmailers to kick the tires and see what we're all about.

When they have a web-based (or thunderbird-based, at least) client, then they'll be competitive with the Yahoo and Gmail hypothetical offerings.

Xobni has been a great productivity tool for me personally, I just wish they would release a public beta already. My co-workers keep asking me to 'hook them up', but my hands are tied at this point.

They're planning on extracting social data from emails when most people use social networks for that task now?

It seems they're asking that people 1) start using their system instead of facebook et al 2) change their email address (unless it works as a plugin on other clients).

If they plan on option two then I think they'll encounter problems: most people I know only use outlook for work use and the web-based ones are unlikely to allow this plugin when they could implement something similar themselves (as gmail already seems to be doing...)

Besides, if they do want to extract social data I'd guess they would need to structure their site like a social networking site which means it will merely become another social networking site.

It seems a very good idea, except for privacy concerns, but I wonder where they'll obtain the users when everyone uses facebook et al for online socialising.

These days I don't really email much, but I guess email is the easiest place to start.

What grad degree were you working on at the time Matt?