-
This site is a curation of observations about what I can best call the intersection of tech and life. Yes, give me a better term.
Over and above that, it's a stream of stuff that I like.
You can explore older stuff on this website, or read a random entry. I've been writing since 2004. You can also read it in your RSS reader.
Comments or interesting links? Email me.
-
About me
-
I'm on Twitter
-
What I'm reading on the web
-
RSS Feed for this website
May
16
Xobni is my most heavily-used application on weekdays – to locate attachments and email from dozens of people. I’ve been an ardent user and evangelist since it was made publicly available over a year ago.
Lately though, Xobni seems to balk at tackling email management problems, even though there is tremendous scope for just that.
The startup’s original vision was compelling – to mine the social network that already exists in email archives. And boy, did they deliver – listing most popular contacts, mining their contact information from email, most recent (threaded) conversations, and a list of exchanged attachments. It was a definite shift in the email paradigm. It seemed like they really understood deficiencies in today’s clients to deal with the volume of business transacted through email. I looked forward to them tackling hard problems in my inbox.
Except that they didn’t.
Some time ago, Xobni announced integration with LinkedIn – then Facebook, then Hoovers, then Skype. These were useful in that LinkedIn pulled up an unknown contact’s official designation and Facebook their (mostly unofficial) profile photo. But they seemed to point to a loss of focus on tacking problems with email itself [1]. Indeed, the company’s last few updates – Skype integration, access to Facebook profile streams – have nothing to do with the company’s original mission at all [2].
There are plenty of things I’d like Xobni to do, as a heavy email user in a large enterprise – integrate with Exchange to pull up profile information for contacts, view recent IM (Microsoft Communicator) conversations with users (just like email), see my last (and future) meetings with a contact – to name a few off the top of my head.
Xobni’s latest feature releases will be attractive for individual users of Outlook, not enterprise users. The latter (who are the bulk of Outlook’s user base) want deeper Xobni integration into their everyday workflow. Integration with LinkedIn and Facebook on the other hand, could be plugin-based and therefore optional.
Xobni is easily the best thing to have happened to email in a long long time. It can either deliver on its vision or integrate with the latest social media sensation. The choice is theirs.
[1] I won’t speculate on whether this has anything to do with the departure of their VP of Engineering, Gabor Cselle, but it *is* ironic that he left to found reMail, a startup that tackles hard problems with mobile email.
[2] Along with these, admittedly, Xobni also improved performance and made the UI marginally more customizable. They still don’t take away from the chief point.