Xobni Goes Public and New Design

I’ve been using Xobni for awhile now ever since I found it and downloaded it initially. I wrote about my experiences with the application. I’ve found that it’s really helpful in a variety of instances when looking for information in e-mail that’s in context with the task you’re trying to accomplish at the moment.

The service is now out of private beta and anyone can download and install it to see for themselves.

I’ve heard some people say that Outlook slowed down tremendously after they installed it, but I haven’t noticed anything like that up until this point during my usage of the application.

With the new public release they’ve also made just some slight appearance modifications to the Xobni information pane.

I don’t think the search function needed to be made quite so prominent in the new, updated user-interface design. Maybe that’s because I’ve not been a big user of the general search features. I more regularly use the network, conversations and files information.

Xobni had some news coverage in the New York Times as well if you’re interested in what some other people besides myself think about the product.

In the article, Jeff Bonforte, expressed interest and goals in expanding the reach of Xobni into other e-mail and communication clients:

Xobni now has ambitions that extend well beyond Microsoft Outlook. Jeff Bonforte, a 35-year-old former Yahoo vice president, joined Xobni as chief executive in February. He plans to expand Xobni’s reach to various e-mail programs, like the popular Web-based services Yahoo Mail, Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail as well as social networks like Facebook and Linkedin.

That would be pretty slick to be able to type in a name in Xobni and it be able to read my e-mail for that contact’s information regardless of which one of my e-mail accounts I had been communicating with the individual.

The only problem I can see is I don’t keep my e-mail around for very long in other e-mail clients. So, not sure if Xobni would keep a history of messages that I’ve already deleted from my system. Not sure how they would.