Jay Eye Sea

Today is definitely a good day, as Xobni came out of private beta (which I wasn’t able to get on). What’s Xobni? In simple terms it’s a free Outlook plugin that makes managing your emails much, much easier.

There’s a few things about Outlook that have always frustrated me:

• The fact that Outlook doesn’t thread conversations nicely has always annoyed me, and since Gmail came out, doubly so. I don’t want to have to jump around between my inbox, other folders and sent items to find all the bits of an email thread.
• The way that it uses email display names (Ian Leader; leader, Ian; etc) rather than actual email addresses (ian.leader@whatever.com) when sorting and searching. It doesn’t matter what the display name is - if the email’s the same then it’s the same person.
• The search function - slow, picky (see the previous point), and unable to ‘answer questions’ like “show me all the attachments that Jon has sent me in the last month”.

Google Desktop Search (GDS)has gone a long way to solving the search problem, but feels like an add-on rather than an integrated part of my email experience, and previously I’d not found solutions to the other problems. Xobni solves them and more:

• When you click on an email you see a sidebar with details of that person, people they appear on emails with frequently, a list of the email threads you’ve had with them, and all the attached files you’ve ever exchanged with them (see 1st screen-shot below)
• When you click on a conversation, you see a threaded list of all the emails in it, along with the people involved in the conversation, and all the attachments in the conversations (2nd screen-shot). You can click on any of the people involved to see their profile, their emails, and so on
• As if that wasn’t enough, there’s a search box, which is fast, and pulls up emails or people who match while you’re typing - unfortunately the search doesn’t work on attachments (not even their titles) but otherwise - stunning

It does a load more - have a look at the video on their web site - but these three things alone will make a huge difference to my daily work.

From my obvious enthusiasm, you’d be forgiven for thinking that I was satisfied with Xobni, but fantastic though it is, I’m afraid not. Here are two things that immediately sprung to mind:

1. A version for Gmail - although Gmail already has threaded conversations and fast search, the ability to browse from people to conversations that involve them, to the attachments they’ve sent like in Xobni would be very useful when you have several years of heavy-use-history. I gather that a Yahoo! mail version is in the works, and thanks to the founders’ decision not to sell to Microsoft (either because the price wasn’t right or because they didn’t like the idea of working there) maybe we’ll get a Gmail version too. . While we’re waiting for it, it’s a logical feature for Google to implement (and if not, I think an outside developer should be able to knock one up: use the Gdata APIs and/or IMAP to mine the data, Grease Monkey to add features to the UI, and run it all on App Engine for seamless integration with Google Apps)
2. A ‘desktop (and web) search’ version that would mine the data in Outlook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook , Xing, instant messenger applications, Google Docs, SalesForce.com, my calendars, documents on my computer and (insert whatever else you use to do work here) to build a browsable, contract-centric complete picture of my working environment. While the list above is quite ambitious, GDS already indexes Outlook, Gmail, contact, calendars, web history and everything that’s on my PC, so it’s not a great leap to imagine presenting that data in a similar way to how Xobni does.