The Next Generation of Social Networking?

At least that's what they claim Gates says on the index page of the service's website. But I wouldn't go that far.

Xobni (the reverse spelling of 'inbox') is a new Outlook app I had read about quite some time ago, and never really got to test it before I got a private beta invitation which turned out to be sent exactly one day prior to the official public launch (good play, though).

If you use Microsoft Outlook to process more than 50 e-mails a day (and I've got at least twice that number), you may find that you've had enough of it after one week - I'm not really a fan, and prefer Thunderbird (if we're talking about Windows), or Entourage (for Mac OS) - although Apple Mail turns out to do its job very well too. So you might imagine what a wreck my Outlook inbox is, after about 1 year and a half of e-mails.

What Xobni is excellent at, after it indexes your entire inbox (I just left it working overnight), to put it simply, is helping you find "that important e-mail that girl from the network whose name you don't remember sent you sometime last year". I consider it the app's primary advantage, and use the feature at its fullest.

But that's not all - what it also tries to do, hence the title of this post, is to pull a 'Google Analytics' move on your e-mails and provide you with individual stats of your conversation history with everyone you've ever exchanged messages with. Graphs with the average of the time of the day you found it easiest to communicate with that person, phone numbers extracted automatically from any e-mail (still a bit woozy), all of the attachments involved in any conversation, and so on. You can even add a picture to the person's profile, which may come in very handy at some point.

But I don't think that just by adding the word "profile" to the whole concoction, the service can actually be included into social networking. I do recommend it (my work colleagues have been installing it like crazy), and ask you this: "Do YOU find Xobni to be the e-mail version of social networking?"