I didn't care about social aspect at all, there were two absolutely crucial features in Xobni that I absolutely loved:
1. Ability to instantly see all attachments sent by a given person.
2. Outlook's own search is unusable, I never mastered it, Xobni was a godsend.
Take any product: some people like it and some won't. I liked Xobni and this guy didn't. God knows why, perhaps he didn't have enough attachments or didn't bother to search anything because of his phenomenal memory or something :)))
I still use LookOut which solved the search issue 4+ years ago. Ironic that Microsoft should buy LookOut. Bury it. Then look at buying a company that solved the same problem again, even after not integrating the previous acquisition (which mind you was fast and never slowed down Outlook).
Unfortunately, I saw the attachment lookup as the only thing useful.
I've never used LookOut, but having thousands of corporate emails in my Outlook, I can say that Xobni really rocks! I quickly ran out on private invites, and just started pirating the software to my coworkers, boss, and even the secretary, who I always catch sitting as his desk searching through emails.
In my opinion, they honed in on a huge problem of email search and solved it really well.
Admittedly, not all of the features of Xobni are very useful, but I think the user interface (keeping the search history), super-fast email search, and phone number extraction are all useful features.
They also did a good job of picking colors to make it look different from Outlook because people who walk by my desk always seem to catch the bright colors and ask me "what is that?!"
That was my first impression too. Xobni is LookOut, only more social. LookOut used Lucene to index the email's and allow flashing-fast searches. Too bad MS killed them.
Note, he used it on a home machine using his webmail, not his work email. Xobni seems much more useful for professional email than the email account you use for your amazon account and emailing your parents.
Feature 1: 1 day work<br>
Feature 2: 1 week work<br>
I used it for a few days and removed it later because it provided no real value, except for my coworkers asking me what I had there in outlook. I don't need a person ranking or the amount of emails sent by that person at a certain timespan. I just want to organize my email.
Comments
I didn't care about social aspect at all, there were two absolutely crucial features in Xobni that I absolutely loved:
1. Ability to instantly see all attachments sent by a given person.
2. Outlook's own search is unusable, I never mastered it, Xobni was a godsend.
Take any product: some people like it and some won't. I liked Xobni and this guy didn't. God knows why, perhaps he didn't have enough attachments or didn't bother to search anything because of his phenomenal memory or something :)))
I still use LookOut which solved the search issue 4+ years ago. Ironic that Microsoft should buy LookOut. Bury it. Then look at buying a company that solved the same problem again, even after not integrating the previous acquisition (which mind you was fast and never slowed down Outlook).
Unfortunately, I saw the attachment lookup as the only thing useful.
I've never used LookOut, but having thousands of corporate emails in my Outlook, I can say that Xobni really rocks! I quickly ran out on private invites, and just started pirating the software to my coworkers, boss, and even the secretary, who I always catch sitting as his desk searching through emails.
In my opinion, they honed in on a huge problem of email search and solved it really well.
Admittedly, not all of the features of Xobni are very useful, but I think the user interface (keeping the search history), super-fast email search, and phone number extraction are all useful features.
They also did a good job of picking colors to make it look different from Outlook because people who walk by my desk always seem to catch the bright colors and ask me "what is that?!"
That was my first impression too. Xobni is LookOut, only more social. LookOut used Lucene to index the email's and allow flashing-fast searches. Too bad MS killed them.
Yeah, from what I understand it was buried to avoid competing with windows live desktop search.
Note, he used it on a home machine using his webmail, not his work email. Xobni seems much more useful for professional email than the email account you use for your amazon account and emailing your parents.
Feature 1: 1 day work<br> Feature 2: 1 week work<br>
I used it for a few days and removed it later because it provided no real value, except for my coworkers asking me what I had there in outlook. I don't need a person ranking or the amount of emails sent by that person at a certain timespan. I just want to organize my email.