

Xobni brings Google Gadgets to Microsoft Outlook - aston
http://www.xobni.com/blog/2010/05/18/google-gadgets-in-microsoft-outlook-yes-thanks-to-xobni/

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brezina
This announcement means that a developer can build a gadget for gmail using
Google's APIs, and Xobni will fully support that Google API to bring the same
gadget into Outlook. Build once and deploy to both gmail & Outlook

More here: <http://www.xobni.com/developer>

And feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to learn more

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jpcx01
All 600 million outlook users... bit of a stretch eh? Having a few million
Xobni installs is pretty good, why not just advertise that?

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brezina
Yikes dude - you are all over this thread.

the total addressable market of gmail is around 120M mailboxes. Building a
gadget won't get you all of those users, you'll still need to convince them to
add your gadget.

Same thing goes for Outlook, yet it the market is bigger. There are 600M
Outlook users, and over 5M xobni downloads, but you'll still have to convince
users to add your gadget. Xobni will just make it super easy for you to take
the gadget you made for gmail, and provide the same functionality to your
Outlook users. Some of those users will be provided by Xobni. And some of
those users will be introduced to Xobni & your gadget by the gadget developer.
The point is this provides access to a huge market with very little effort.

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jpcx01
Spent a few weeks building a gadget so I have a few opinions on the matter
:-).

The point of the post was to clarify that you guys are enabling people to plug
into _your_ plugin. So the addressable market is the few million people who
are actively using Xobni. Not all 600 million outlook users.

Now if you guys provided a redistributable that allowed me to package up my
Gadget and ACTUALLY sell to all 600million outlook users, that would catch my
attention. But one caveat is it would need to allow for the actual Xobni
mining stuff (the memory/cpu hog) to be toggled on/off, but still allow for
the contextual gadget to show up.

I like what you guys are doing, and will probably participate. However, just
had to let out a few gripes first ;-)

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brezina
Awesome - We definitely make Xobni redistributable by partners. Email me matt
at companyname. We'd love to help make this a success for you.

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justlearning
I tried Xobni (post yahoo acquiring) in a 'corporate setup' and found it to be
a memory hog, The startup time is ridiculous with increasing mailbox size. I
am better off searching outlook based on filters than using Xobni. And now
adding more gadgets to outlook will just make it an obese guy in designer
clothes.

I wonder who uses Xobni? Any genuine Xobni users here?

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jamesbkel
Really? I haven't noticed it to be a resource hog and I find the search to be
worlds better than Outlook, which some how manages to miss the obvious yet
find the obscure every time I search.

My mailbox is a pretty good size, but perhaps I haven't reached that threshold
yet.

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nhebb
_Outlook, which some how manages to miss the obvious_

I've noticed a quirk in Outlook 2007 that if I add an extra character to the
search then hit backspace, it will find items it didn't find before.

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iamelgringo
I really like Xobni, guys. I'm seriously thinking of dropping Gmail for my day
to day use, and using Outlook + Xobni. Gmail's contact management sucks after
you pass 200 or so contacts. Your contact management is really really cool.

If you guys built an Android app, I'd eagerly pay $15 bucks or so for it, and
I'd happily make the complete transition from Gmail to Outlook + you guys.
Just a thought.... Feel free to ping me if you are interested in talking to a
motivated customer.

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pazpaz
one step closer to googol-sized acquisition. make it so brezina.

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aditya
How is this different from using the Outlook Social Connector
([http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c87...](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c87e257c-d76f-4785-a09b-af36babd6e32&displaylang=en))
- and why would you want to use a layer in the middle (Xobni) other than for
portability? Will there be performance issues?

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brezina
You should try the outlook social connector and report back.

but here are my answers: 1\. OSC isn't compatible with google gadgets 2\. OSC
isn't very customizable for developers - the presentation layer is super
limited 3\. OSC requires a special install on Outlook 2003, 2007 - so for
those users it will be a choice of one plugin: OSC or another Xobni 4\. OSC
doesn't improve Outlook search 5\. OSC requires seperate installs if you want
to get twitter, facebook, linkedin, salesforce, sharepoint, etc inside it.
Xobni has that all with one install. 6\. This is our business. OSC was a msft
afterthought to respond to Xobni. Users that compare the two prefer Xobni
(actually, good idea, i should run a formal study on this)

Performance issues? I've heard some people complain about perf issues with OSC
;) but seriously, we've worked really hard on performance. Installed software
is tough. And for most users, they have zero problems.

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aditya
Thanks for the response, Matt! Unfortunately, it seems that documentation is
really sparse for OSC and Xobni already seems to have solved quite a few of
the challenges for Outlook.

Suppose I'll try it for myself and see how it goes.

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jpcx01
Thats great, but the devil's in the details. Are you using the same Extractors
API so it'll inspect the messages and provide matches?

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brezina
Yes. We support the exact same google Extractors API, so you'll have all the
info you need to show relevant context to the message.

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jpcx01
Umm, not according to your docs. <http://www.xobni.com/support/?view=192>

Recipient extractors are a tad bit important. No doubt its coming soon on your
dev roadmap though.

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brezina
We support the most important recipient extractor RecipientEmailExtractor -
which gives you all recipients in both the to and cc field.

We don't support RecipientToEmailExtractor and RecipientCCEmailExtractor right
now, but we will with tonight's release.

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jpcx01
Ah, cool. That'll work.

