greatapps

How disappointing that your only contribution to this discussion is to be snide and rude. I've offered an opinion about an application and the utility I derived on my blog. Thereafter I've commented on the price offered for a company. By definition these are subjective matters. Isn't the point of this forum is for you to articulate where you differ and why, rather than offering childish playground insults.

Just in case I am missing features from the version I have installed, here's what I can access in Xobni from the top - emails received time summary graph. - count of emails sent/received and resultant ranking - request for phone number / phone number captured from email - "schedule time" which opens a blank email - create email - listing of other people that were included on emails received from the contact, and ability to hop onto the email profile for that person if they too are one of your contacts - list of emails from the contact which you can navigate to - list of file exchanged which you can navigate to

Anyone got anything different? I ask only because as I'm evidently missing something in the app, based on some of the comments made towards me.

Let's be clear, if you love the app then that's great and I want to hear how it has helped you. If I am missing a trick, then perhaps others are to and so help us to be believers. If you've spotted where this app is heading, explicitly clue the rest of us in, don't simply allude.

I got my invite to trial the product on Dec 14 2007 and tested the Xobni service over a few weeks using Outlook 2003. I've also re-installed it recently, just in case there were new features which would change my views - not so far.

Several people have mentioned the requirement to aggregate across multiple webmail clients - I confess that I'm not affected by this as I consolidate multiple email accounts in one location and avoid the need to check separate email services individually. If operating on multiple webmail clients is common practice, then I confess to having been ignorant of this gap in the market - of course, people could consolidate their email in either Outlook or Gmail.

As for search, does Google Desktop search not work on your PC? It searches both within your email [certainly Outlook and Gmail] and across the filing system, whilst being free. This should go some way to addressing your example of locating conversations. As for the media attachments, I concede that I've long since stopped using my email inbox as a filing system, saving them off to file directories if they are important enough [Pst files in particular always seem to react badly].

My comment wasn't intended to be either obtuse or obnoxious. I was merely asking for an elaboration - its too easy to say there are lots of xxxxxx, but without evidencing what they are.

On your point about the aggregation of such data across a company, I concur. In a thread above, I did note that their current offering may be prelude to looking at the corporate market. However, this is not virgin territory as there are already tools that seek to discover corporate relationships at a macro level from data mining email inboxes, albeit they are only starting to make inroads into businesses. They work unobtrusively behind the scenes to provide business "intelligence" which can include highlighting colleagues who appear to have active communications with a "target".

Surrendering such data to your employer is one thing. However, you allude to an interesting notion, namely Xobni perhaps aggregating and making use of data from the individual in the personal market. That could be a very tough sell amidst probable privacy concerns, but of keen interest to an advertiser at the very least.

Re your point on having to thoroughly explain your revenue model to investors, there are some VCs/investors who are happy to let this emerge, odd as that may sound. For instance, I believe that Fred Wilson [of A VC blog fame] has commented along these lines about his investment in Twitter. In some of these instances, the plan appears to be to focus on building a large active user base, preferably one that gets "locked in" via a network effect and then figuring out how to monetise.

I am interested to hear about the "bunch of possible directions" you can see. Can you elaborate?

re the photo, one tries to please. Sadly, I am getting fewer invitations out for a drink following the change :-)

Please elaborate on the many things you evidently think it could be, highlighting how easily and in what timeframe they could achieve this, thereby "educating" the rest of us?

Homework? In the last blog post to which you refer I gave a personal account of the usefulness of Xobni to me, and wasn't presenting a research paper.

I'd be delighted to hear the ways you think they can monetise the product/feature, partly to demonstrate the amount of thought you've given the matter.

In its current incarnation, Xobni is a tool aimed at the individual user. Obviously, the company/product can go in all sorts of directions but so can anyone given time/money/effort.

Let's consider the possibility that their current offering is a prelude to looking at the corporate market. There are already tools that seek to discover corporate relationships at a macro level from data mining email inboxes, albeit they are only starting to make inroads into businesses. They work unobtrusively behind the scenes to provide business "intelligence" which can include highlighting colleagues who appear to have active communications with a "target".

You should also consider that many CRM tools already enable emails to be automatically incorporated into the communication profile/history of a contact, supplemented by richer tools than Xobni presently offer [task mgt, workflow] e.g. salesforce, zoho crm, siebel.

The observations I made about Xobni on my blog post were reflective of a) having formerly used Outlook for many years in large corporate settings b) my assessment of the functional usefulness of the add-in to me. I'm happy to hear about your personal experiences of the add-in in order to better understand the killer features/purposes I've apparently missed and the value it has given you.

Sumon, thanks for your kind comment on my "standing". I look forward to seeing you again in London in person, perhaps at Open Coffee, and maybe we can compare our respective CVs. Meantime, perhaps you can elaborate on what relevance my employment has to my comments on my user experience of this Outlook add-in?

Dear All, as the originator of the blog post that has sparked this thread may I begin by apologising for my sloppy spelling errors on the post, which I've corrected and thanks for highlighting them. However, to correct some of the misunderstandings and prejudices of other contributors to this thread

- I was testing the add-in using BUSINESS email and sadly have too many attachments on incoming emails from people who don't use online collaboration services.

- I've never tended to use an email inbox to store documents, preferring windows file folders instead. Hence the attachments get saved off on receipt. Personally I always found Outlook quite flaky as a file storage system and would also hate to rely on remembering who sent which document.

- I had to test Xobni on a family desktop as I've migrated away from Outlook for all my work activities and Xobni only works in Outlook. Why pay licence fees when you can use identical services online for free and access them from anywhere? Hence, I simply downloaded business emails onto the home machine to test over a couple of weeks.

- Google desktop search is what I use to find anything on a PC, albeit most of my docs get stored in the "cloud" these days. Hence, Xobni "search", which is restricted to Outlook content, was superfluous.

- As for the photo comments, sadly it's the face I was born with and the photo was taken by Ian Forrestor of BBC Backstage fame at the London BBC Backstage & Geek party in 2006. That my opinion is diminished coz you don't like my picture...........wow, tough crowd

- Oddly enough, I was writing as a past Xobni user and of my experience of the product - my comments had nothing to do with being an investor.

- I'm delighted that some people could derive use from this product. Evidently we have considerably different needs or have settled on alternate solutions.