We are moving closer and closer to the social inbox—email that talks to your social networks. Today, Xoopit launches in private beta. Not to be confused with Xobni (another email 2.0 app), Xoopit is a plug-in for FireFox that lets you easily view all the photos, videos, and files buried in your e-mail as attachments and sent to you as links from across the Web. The first 700 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will get in. CEO Bijan Marashi explains:
We are building an index of your personal information across the Internet. Email is the most important repository of your personal data. Xoopit processes the social media you have been piling up for years and transforms it into a fun application.
The application indexes your Gmail (other email services will be added in the future) and lets you view attached files (photos, videos, etc). It also fetches any images that friends might have emailed you from Flickr, Picassa, Shutterfly, Kodak, or YouTube. It is an attempt to turn your email inbox into a dashboard for managing all the pictures and videos everyone emails you all the time. In turn, you can post your own photos, videos, and other media directly to Facebook, your blog or email from the application.
Xoopit is also announcing a $5 million A round from Accel and Foundation Capital. It previously raised $1.5 million in an angel round from Foundation Capital, Michael Dearing, Jeff Ralston, and Eric Telenius.
The world is running out of good domain names, huh?
I almost signed up. Not comfortable giving out my password…
$5million to make a Firefox plug-in? Haha! I think the guys at Accel etc must have been feeling optimistic that day (or would someone care to explain to me how this service could ever turn a profit?). I guess they can always hope Google acquires them.
I understand all the cool email services use an X in their name.
Looking forward to trying out the service.
Cheers,
Randy Stewart
randy@boxbe.com
Erik, i second Vaibhav on this. I also find it discomfiting to provide my gmail passwd. What’s your take on that ?
I suppose that somebody has to see first their Term of Use:
“If you register and provide us with the address and password of the Email Account, you agree that we may access the Email Account in association with services provided by the Site (the “Services”). You also acknowledge and agree that we may from time to time, as necessary, take certain actions in the Email Account in order to enable the Services to function. These actions may include, but are not limited to allowing IMAP. ”
It’s really funny!
This is a stupid idea. I need to start a new company if they are giving away $5 million for ideas like this.
I think those people overly confident to expect users to handover all email passwords and allow them access everyone’s email accounts.
Who are they? Why should I trust them? Just because they are backed by those “famous v.c.” as they marked in their about page?
I was reluctant to provide my password but my curiosity won. I have used for a few minutes and I have just changed my gmail password…
I’m not sure of what it does, but I permanently deleted a message and the photos on it keep appearing.
Now I’m trying to find how to avoid their rule to appear on my inbox (it asks me to log in).
I don’t recommend signing up for this.
1. It requires you start off with your email password
2. It stores copies of your mail/attachments on their servers
3. There is no automated way to cancel/delete your account or your data once they’ve grabbed it
Ultimately, there just seems to be no reason for them to have anything on their servers considering the value add to email is to make a few new screens showing photos/files. Makes me very uneasy.
Nice.. need better auth methods…
Absolutely agree with #10.
I’ve uninstalled the plug-in and the toolbar doesn’t appear any more in my inbox, but my info must be somewhere… as the saying goes: curiosity killed the cat (or something like that).
The screenshots look nice. I don’t use gmail but if I did I’d never give up my pw.
Congratulations to Xoopit team.
There is definitely demand out there for these tools. Though asking password upfront is a big hassle and I am sure Xoopit team is working on making that less initimidating.
At MessageDance we found in our survey that users are less worried about passwords to their social sites (flickr, youtube etc) and extremely sensitive about their email account.
so i just followed the link…was wary about giving both my email and password to these guys…why do they need my password if this is a plug in to firefox… but seeing that you guys are endorsing them, i did…but when i did i was redirected to a sign-in page that told me my email and address was not right…huh?…did they already fill up the 700 spots?…did they just steal my gmail login info?…hope i just didn’t give a way the farm to these guys…
looks like the Crunch 503′d em…
the site is down. at least we know where they can invest half of those funds.
@#12
If you want your account deleted, you can email support@xoopit.com with your request. They’re being very friendly and reasonable about it, which I do applaud them for.
The website is already down:
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at http://www.xoopit.com Port 80
i do not even tell my wife my password for gmail account (nothing to hide from her though ) .
how will i tell this company. are these guys kidding ?
@#3 ACO – They got the money to develop a product that just happens to be delivered as Firefox plugin.
Arh, I got a better idea.
Can you guys give us all your accounts and the passwords (including your bank accounts)? We can for sure develop a very cool service (and integrating every piece of data from all of your accounts) and add values to your life.
Folks, converting a few images and building an index are easy. Gaining trust is hard.
Wow…
Service Temporarily Unavailable …
what will happen when everyday 10-20million users will try to login to their account with this firefox plugin and see Service Temporarily Unavailable …
looks like they didn’t do their homework ….
hope they still have some money left and didnt spend it all on marketing ..
I think whats more likely is facebook giving each user their own inbox with a few gigs and getting even more page views that way.
@Jason
Social networking stuff are mostly for fun (such as flicr etc). But emails are mostly for serious stuff – including your business conversations etc… it’s your basic communication choke point.
Check out your major email inbox and see what % of your conversations related to business.
That’s the difference, at least to me. (I agree some people do not care any online privacy at all.) There is nothing wrong to ask for passwords to people basic communication choke points.. but it will just make alot people uncomfortable. Making a few thumbnails is hard to justify that. Just my opinions though.
How is viewing and sharing you photos within your email make this “social email”????? That headline is so inaccurate. It’s just a firefox addon that helps you share stuff from a central point of your inbox. I agree with most of the commenters above that I don’t want my email attachments indexed. No thank you. You had me all excited that something really innovative was coming out from your headline. So disappointed. Sigh.
Hi, this is JK, one of Xoopit’s founders. We’ve seen the comments regarding email passwords and privacy issues. You can think of Xoopit as a mail client, which makes it possible for you to access your mail data. We use industry best practices to secure our service and encrypt your password and have rigorous internal policies on the same.
You can learn more about how we manage your data on our blog:
http://blog.xoo...oopit-mana.html
It seems as if you can give xoopit ANY valid gmail login info, but use it on all your accounts. The plugin is native to the browser, not the account, so you can just signup an empty new gmail, plug that info in, but use it on your real account…
I liked the results. All my photos are instantly available for sharing/comment. I am not worried about email password, coz you can change it.
I would like to see some filters and more control over the indexing. Like, I don’t want to index my documents/files or I don’t want to index photos that are send from me. I would love to see a section for music as well. If it can find all the music and lets you play with a flash player (like gmail does), it would be awesome.
create an empty gmail account and then install it. giving out email ids for some plug-in seems like a dangerous thing to do. why’d i need to all this junk for a stupid “value add”???