

Xobni (YC S06) comes to Gmail - noelsequeira
http://www.xobni.com/gmailbeta

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tednaleid
I've never understood the pitch for Xobni (or Rapportive for that matter), but
maybe that means I'm not the target audience. All of the people I e-mail with
are either people that I know in person (so I know what they look like), or
it's a one time thing likely never to be repeated again.

Is there something I'm missing? I could see the value if I were in sales or
some other position where I was contacting way too many people to keep them
all straight in my head, but that feels like a fairly small minority of
people.

~~~
iamelgringo
I completely understand this problem, and I'm frustrated to no end that
innovation in email has stagnated.

I have a standing offer at Hackers & Founders events to pay anyone who helps
me fix my email problems $20 to 40 a month as their first subscription
customer. My hair is on fire. I'm a motivated buyer. And, I'm convinced that
there are millions of business people world wide that have this very problem.
Every single business person that complains about email overload has this
problem, but probably can't articulate it well.

I need an email system where a contact is considered a first class citized.
GMail's innovation was proper management of the conversation (threaded view).
But, I'm convinced that their engineers don't see the problems with contact
management because they benefit from a universal address book, and they don't
interact with random people that aren't in their global address book.

Business communication isn't about viewing a single conversation thread. It's
about building a relationship with a person over time.

In my email, I need to quickly know who I'm talking to, I need to have quick
and easy access to previous conversations I've had with this person. I need to
be able to easily write comments and meta data about this person. I need my
email to automatically recognize contact information from a new person I'm
emailing, and automatically put that into my address book.

Xobni comes the closest I've seen to fixing those problems. I wish more people
would innovate in this space.

I've been running H&F for 3 years, and I have close to a thousand contacts. I
live out of my email, and sadly, Gmail is increasingly broken for me. In the
next month, I'm going back to Outlook + Xobni for email management ( unless
the Xobni plugin for gmail is fantastic), and I'm giving up my Android for a
Blackberry, because they have a Xobni app. and their email platform seems much
more mature. As for the back end, I might still stick with Google Apps for
business, but I'm increasingly dissatisfied, and I'm thinking of migrating
over to an Exchange based platform.

If anyone starts work on fixing this problem, please let me know. I'm a
motivated buyer.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
A minor point: threaded view is _old_ \- jwz publicized the Netscape Mail 2.0
(!) algorithm at <http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html>, and I didn't even
check whether that was the oldest appearance.

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davidedicillo
It would be nice to have this and Rapportive integrate. I use Rapportive as
personal CRM, but definitely some of the stats offered by Xobni are very
interesting.

~~~
rahulvohra
hey Davide, which one stat would you say is most interesting?

~~~
scorpion032
How would you compare your service with Xobni? You think you already provide a
finer version of the other?

~~~
rahulvohra
I can't say much right now, but you'll see how we're different in the coming
year! We've just been setting the stage :)

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m0nastic
I think this is really smart on their part. I got super nervous about their
viability after Microsoft launched Outlook Social Connector (which seems to
not be as good, but is free and natively part of Outlook).

I've tried using Rapportive and Etacts at various times, but never really
derived enough use to keep using them.

Also excited for an iOS app, their Blackberry app is really nice.

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usertm
Any beta-testers here? Do I have to use with IMAP, or is it completele web-
based?

