Xoopit, the social webmail plugin that indexes your Gmail account’s media attachments, has launched Gmail Media Search. The new feature compliments Gmail’s standard text search by including a sidebar that lists file attachments, photos, and videos. The first 500 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will gain access to the service, which is currently in private beta.
The Gmail Media Search sidebar separates search results by type, offering thumbnails of the top matches from each category in a manner that resembles Apple’s Spotlight. Users can also hone their searches by only listing content that has been received from certain contacts. In practice the Media Search is a perfect compliment to Google’s standard search, though I’d like to see some more options (for example, the ability to check off certain file types to search).
As we noted in our original review, Xoopit goes beyond simply searching through attachments by crawling your inbox for links to media. This means that when someone sends you a link to a Flickr album, the photos within that album with be indexed and searchable as well.
For now Xoopit is only available for Gmail, but the company has plans to expand to other webmail platforms like Yahoo Mail and AOL in the near future. They also plan to integrate the new media search with their iGoogle widget, which should make finding photos and attachments even more convenient.
You can check out a screencast of Gmail Media Search here.
Very Funny!
search for Gmail when Google is around. It is like trying to sell Milk to a Cow.
Cheers, Nag
Signed up.
Let’s see if it works in Opera.
You spelled ‘Xoopit’ incorrectly in the 3rd paragraph. This service reminds me of Xobni for some reason, being an extension for web mail apps rather than Outlook or any other client.
Arghh.. Firefox only!
A question for the folks at Xoopit – just wondering how the thought process goes:
I think your site name is pronounced “zoo – pit”, yes?
I find that if I browse to zoopit.com I end up at your site xoopit.com.
So if you own the domain name zoopit.com, and the site’s name is pronounced zoopit.com, why didn’t you just call the site zoopit.com?
What on the earth?. Xoopit gets funded for plugin that is only on Firefox On top of that its only for Gmail. I like MessageDance they do this and much more. Its a social inbox. you make your emails more social by sharing with friends. You will get message broadcasting capability, Blogging from virtually anywhere including Facebook message compose. MessageDance rocks.
Consider MessageDance = Xoopit + BlogIt + ping.fm + twitter client.
Sorry, based on the logo the pronunciation should be “zoop – it”.
Signed up. Waiting for it to find all the media in my Gmail account.
i don’t like the idea of startups searching, tracking, messing up my gmail account – sorry, maybe with a kind of official Google approval …
tested and uninstalled.
Dont like the interface at all.
Signed up.
Looks neat.
sent from: fav.or.it [FID184999]
nice
sent from: fav.or.it [FID185179]
So this is basically for people that don’t know about Gmail operators?
You could just do searches like this:
“.mp3 has:attachment from:joebob”
and you’d find what you’re looking for pretty quick. They haven’t done the best job in publicizing that, though the advanced search option in Gmail will produce many of the operators for you too.
hey everyone – thanks for checking out our service.
sanjay, what don’t you like about our interface? would love some feedback. i would definitely let the indexing finish and then do some gmail searches. xoopit add search results for attachments, photos, videos, links to media on the web in your right hand side bar. this could save you a lot of time…
give it my gmail password? dont think so
Wait, google is prevented from reproducing this feature how exactly? IP? $6.5M in funding??? PFFFT.
This is a feature, no matter how many different webmail platforms they offer, the competitive advantage isn’t there.
I know I’m missing something because VCs don’t just throw that cash without looking deeply. Anyone know?
Xoopit is a wonderful addon for gmail. I know this because i do not have a web photo album. Xoopit came in and built on the fly for me. I just tried the new plugin and I can tell you that it does add value. Xoopit is clearly on the right path.
@16
I agree. It is wrong to ask for someone’s password on another site. I sort of think that it is irresponsible of well-meaning sites to do this, because it trains (novice) Internet users to think this is normal and acceptable behavior.
I can see how it should be the user’s responsibility to decide who they trust, but it’s just too hard these days to judge what is a real site and what is not. In 15 minutes an evil-doer could make a Web2.0 login page that looks like a great new site that needs your GMail password. Hmmmm.
@18
Who the hell are you? The intern?
If they have no competitive advantage, they will not last. I will not use ephemeral services.
I would think twice about this. You grant Xoopit acces to your entire mailbox. Not only do they index your media, they also place it on their servers with contactdetails. They index more than only attachments and they do more than indexing.
(Yeah I was so stupid to give it a try)
“give it my gmail password? dont think so”
You’re smarter than most. Handing over your Gmail password is a terrible idea.
Hi, this is Bijan Marashi, 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
We are working with webmail providers so that we can reduce amount of data we collect and store: e.g. OAuth for credentials, not having to store attachments ourselves and more. We’re big believers in email as a platform. This is just the first step.
That’s an awesome product… how well does it integrate with Gmail or any other email services? The founder read this http://www.read...ex.php?rta=blog
@20.
Have you installed Xoopit? I can guarantee you that within a year they will become one of the biggest personal media site.
Their Firefox addon has some problems in it. After enabling, whenever I try to close my Gmail Inbox tab, my Firefox gets stuck till it does not suck at least 1GB of my RAM.
Not giving Xoopit my password. Sorry but that’s a flaw in your business model.
I agree with people who decided not to give their password. I felt the same when I saw the first page of the service. More importantly, the Google password is not jut for mail – personally I use a number of services from Google, all with the same credentials. If my account is compromised, intentionally or otherwise, the amount of headache I have too deal with will be way too much.
I read Bijan Marashi’s comment about Xooping being like a mail client, but I respectfully disagree. Mail clients are mostly “local” applications, so yes I’m storing my gmail password in my Thunderbird or Outlook but it’s on my own disk. Xoopit is a hosted service and the data will reside in the cloud. Even if they encrypt it, they have the key to decrypt it (they need do). It’s not like they encrypt it with a key that only I have access to. So if their service is compromised my password will be compromised too.
So, I decided not to sign up. Good luck.
Been using this plugin for a long time and I wish it would not scan emails i have deleted. Can you tell it not to scan Trashed Items?? I hate looking in there and seeing tons of photos from FWDs i never opened. Only trashed.
I would really like to try it out, but am definitely reluctant to hand over my password.