Yahoo is killing support for a popular Gmail plug-in from Xoopit, a startup it acquired in July. An email was sent out today to Xoopit users on Gmail tited, “Xoopit for Gmail is closing. Here’s the info you’ll need.” It details different ways users can export their files, photos, videos, and other attachments which may be stored on the service.
Xoopit is a handy email plug-in that works with both Gmail and Yahoo Mail. In Gmail, it creates a strip across the top which shows you images of all recent attachments, making it possible to visually scan email for their contents instead of by subject lines. You can also click on the Xoopit thumbnail strip so that it takes over the whole screen with a grid of photos, images, videos, and docs.
Yahoo has acquired e-mail startup Xoopit for a reported $20 million according to multiple reports. The deal, which was first reported to be in the final stages of closing earlier this morning by the Wall Street Journal, is expected to be announced at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference as early as tomorrow.
Xoopit essentially offers an easy way to organize and manage e-mail, having invented an indexing architecture similar to web search engines that helps users retrieve content from their archived e-mail, including attachments.
The startup raised a total of $6.5 million to date, securing seed funding amounting up to $1.5 million back in December 2006 and raising $5 million more from Accel Partners and Foundation Capital in April 2008.
Yahoo is introducing a slew of new applications that aim to complement its free webmail service today. Since December last year, Yahoo features a number of third-party applications inside Yahoo Mail, such as Xoopit, Flickr and Flixster, all in a good effort to reduce the amount of websites you need to visit as well as time you need to spend to perform certain task related to communicating with your friends, relatives or co-workers.
Starting today, that list includes other tools like online payment platform PayPal, basic photo editor Picnik, Xoopit service MyPhotos and file sharing application Zumo Drive.
Xoopit, a social networking email enhancement that allows users to locate files, images and videos in their inbox, has launched a new feature that lets Gmail users immediately see and set Facebook status messages and view profile photos of their Facebook friends while reading emails off a Gmail account.
Users can also quickly see other information such as birthdays and mobile phone numbers. After downloading the feature, a user can easily update their own status directly from a Gmail account using Facebook Connect. Xoopit’s new feature is pretty neat and gives users the ability to bounce between Facebook and Gmail accounts seamlessly. And Facebook’s status message feature is one that most users check most frequently, so its particularly useful to the average Facebook user.
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.
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.
