Jeff Bonforte never met an API he didn’t like. The CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes an outlook plug-in that makes your e-mail smarter, has been busy getting his team of engineers to integrate every possible API they can think of into the service. Xobni already added LinkedIn last June. Today it is adding integrations with Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, and Hoovers. Data from all of these services appears in the Xobni sidebar in Outlook. Let’s take them one by one.
Xobni has been working on its Yahoo Mail integration since last April. Now in the sidebar, users can search their Yahoo Mail messages and see contacts and attachments. To send or receive email through your Yahoo account, however, you still have to click through to Yahoo Mail in your browser, which is sub-optimal.
Every time someone sends you an email who is also a Facebook member, you can see in the sidebar their current Facebook status message, general profile information, their Facebook picture, and recent updates made to their profile.
The Skype feature lets you send instant messages, SMS messages, and make Skype or regular calls to contacts who are also Skype users. Again, as with Yahoo Mail, actually making a call or sending an IM automatically launches the Skype application.
Finally, the Hoover API brings up Hoover company information for each contact. That provides some helpful context when responding to business emails, although I find the LinkedIn data more useful.
no gmail? Or am I missing something and they already have that?
Xobni overloaded. Two thumbs up!
More Xobni bloat! Enjoy your Outlook crashes. I gave that app a try until it fubared my Outlook. NEVER AGAIN!!
Yeah, I wonder if they’ve added the feature where Xobni doesn’t slow Outlook to a crawl yet. After installing it, every single move I made in Outlook took between five and ten seconds — even just down-arrowing from one message to the next.
Honestly, doesn’t anyone think that “Xobni” is a stupid name?
Oh btw.
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it’s ‘inbox’ backwards. so no.
that’s exactly why it’s stupid.
yeah they should call it diputs!
I just downloaded and installed. It seems to work faster than previous versions. The new integrations are actually pretty useful. If you use Outlook, Xobni is a pretty indespensible tool.
Xobni becomes the part of my outlook express for the past one year. Thank you xobni team for making my outlook life faster and fun. You guys rock.
The Skype integration looks killer. As a regular Skype user I have to say I’m pretty excited about this.
Thanks for publicly broadcasting someone’s phone number. Been meaning to test new cranks.
Damg 555.
Xobni has a terrific interface and functionality that’s worth the “slight” slowdown in Outlook. I’ve never been able to so quickly liberate the contents of my mailbox, find old emails and files. And the network and analysis aspects, which I frankly don’t use much if at all, hold tremendous prospects in the future…though they need to have been/more obvious usage/UI.
where did my comment go ?
$4.35 million to make your e-mail smarter…where do these guys get the funding!?!
Integration of all application would be great to manage each and every account from one point…. Is there any flash widget that integrate every network..
Xobni is already brings Outlook 2007 to a Halt. Completely unusable. All this bloatware is not going to help the situation.
what a relief after uninstalling xobni.
with that, outlook took almost 10 mins to open everytime. totally slowed down my outlook.
Adam Smith eh? I’m using that number for subscribing to all the porn..thanks!
The only plugin they are missing is the brontosaurus plugin that makes your outlook so fat that it cant even crawl. It feeds on all the emails and farts crashes.
I installed Xobni, but had to install it cause it slowed outlook so much that I could actually take a flight to the other side of the world and the contact in person and talk to him before it loads my mail. And then it crashed my PST’s completely, thanks to the backups that I didnt loose my job!
Kudos for making such a wonderful plugin!
I’m surprised that there are so many people using outlook? I’m I the only one who would never switch from thunderbird to outlook?
Nope, but you should also be using engimail and lightening add-ons.
Mozilla seems to neglect thunderbird perhaps because there is no revenue generated by it.
You can check this tip to convert your Firefox into a complete Email client.
http://www.addi...n-email-client/
sounds good.
does it still use 100% cpu though? if not I might give it another try.
angus
Does it actually include the kitchen sink? If so… I want this app!
Any idea when we should be expecting a Mac version or if we should be expecting it?
I second that Ayokunle. I used this on Outlook when I had a PC but now I only use a Mac and it would be great to test it out. When I used it on the PC back in Xobni’s beta days. It WAS a dog and crashed Outlook consistently. I had everyone in the office install it and within a week everyone was about to hang me for killing their productivity due to the slowness and crashing of Outlook with Xobni installed.
I understand since they went out of Beta and launched a newer version of Xobni that the performance issues were corrected and it doesnt crash outlook as much. so i am curious to try it out on my Mac as well.
Much need for the Mac port… and Gmail too.
does anyone in the real world use it?
I used Xobni for a couple of months. It is “neat” but hardly something I can’t live without.
I’m using for almost a year and boy am I happy with it!
It’s killer feature to me is the acurate search results and the ability to find connected contacts.
It does have crashing issues though especially if you have another plug-in installed in Outlook ( I do and it crashes once in a week or so ).
When will threaded style come to XOBNI
thats the only thing which seems to be left now
My friend is apprehensive about using xobni because of all the discussion about performance hits/ crashing. Anyone using this alongside the salesforce plug-in?
With all those Runtime errors, crashes, bloating… Xobni makes Outlook totally unusable.
This app is bloated, unstable and unusable. Installed caused outlook to grind to a halt. Ouy kcuf!! Spell that backward beeotch!
Keep an eye on http://www.inboxxed.com.
Xobni is focused on the consumer play where as inboxxed is focused on solely the business user who uses Outlook.
This space is getting crowded!
Taglocity is also focused on professional users in the workplace – “The evolution of email”
Check it out: http://www.taglocity.com
..dont know about anyone else, but xobni seems totally useless and simply creating unnecessary noise..
yeah they should call it “diputs”!
Plain and simple this app is atttempting to do too much. This is the primary problem with mashup style apps like this. What if any or all of the crap load of services and API’s it depends on go down?
A few points on this latest release…
1) If you don’t want any of these integrations, you can turn them off with one checkbox in our options menu. Viola, you have Xobni without integrations.
2) If you want to temporarily hide them, just hit the chevron on the right of the extension toolbar, and they disappear.
3) Visually, the product is actually less cluttered, than prior releases. We have reduced the complexity and brought key information like a second phone number and the email address to the front of the app.
4) We have massively increased the number of photos you will see with contacts. With the Facebook and LinkedIn integrations, you no longer have to manually add photos. It is incredible.
We have been very pleased with the response from our users to this release. The feedback is overwhelmingly positive. Even many have picked up on some of the performance enhancements and stability improvements in the product.
If you are a Xobni user and have specific feedback about the product, please come participate on our forums. We read everything and incorporate the feedback into future releases.
Jeff Bonforte
CEO, Xobni
Love Xobni sooo much, increases efficiency and networks you so rapidly…
All that considered it kills my Outlook… I’m trying it again with the new version, fingers crossed. I do have a 12GB mailbox, wonder if that’s a problem…?
I like some of the features (attachment search, yahoo mail integration) is good.. but many appears to be fancy for me …
I will have to try this software:)
I love Xobin – it’s proven to be really useful.
However, now with Outlook 2007 running under XP SP3 – it does seem rather unstable – unless I am connected to the VPN / office network. In offline mode – it seems to crash 2 out of 3 attempts to load – connect to the network and it loads fine irrespective of how the Start Xobin with outlook flag is set.
Shame though as I normally work with exchange in cached mode.
sorry about the name change – doh!!!