Monday, May 5th, 2008...7:59 pm - Brett Robertson
Social networking via Microsoft Outlook? who would of thought?
To help add a social networking feel for Microsoft Outlook e-mail users, San Francisco startup Xobni has launched a beta service aimed at helping organize their e-mail inboxes by business and personal relationships.
As Outlook remains the most common program used for e-mail in corporate America, Xobni (available for download here) aims to make it easier for users to find e-mail addresses and phone numbers faster than simply relying on Outlook alone.
“Today is an exciting day for everyone at Xobni,” the official Xobni blog reports. “After seven months of invite-only beta, and over two years of product development, we’re proud to announce that Xobni is now publicly available for anyone to download.”
Operating as a sidebar, Xobni offers fast e-mail searching, threaded conversations, while showing users relationships, communication habits and context around select e-mail messages.
Using inbox data mining methods, Xobni collects names, phone numbers and mailing addresses, then adds them to users’ sidebar. For example, clicking on an e-mail from a co-worker will provide the user with that co-worker’s personal data, conversation statistics, other conversations, and transferred attachments such as photos and PDFs.
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