Finally! A really useful MS Outlook plug-in. GigaOM had an article about this new application formally launched this week @ TechCrunch40. Xōbni mines your e-mail archives and creates a series of profiles for everyone you exchange e-mail with. You can see how many mails have been exchanged, histograms displaying times of day and various other stats. More interestingly, the application develops a view to your social network by connecting dots between people you are in contact with those they are in contact with. For the statistics geeks (like me), check out Xōbni Analytics (under the Xōbni pull-down in the main MS Outlook toolbar) which has a variety of charts and graphs on your e-mail patterns. And, OBTW, it contains an e-mail search feature. I’ve long been a Copernic Desktop Search fan, but since my forced move back in Jun’07 to Windows Vista, I’ve sort of stuck with the Microsoft Instant Search feature. But Instant Search isn’t all that “instant” and is a far cry from Copernic’s usability. Looking forward to trying something new in this area.
I’m a little concerned about adding Xōbni since Windows Vista is such a resource hog: my HP Pavilion dv2410us notebook PC has an AMD Turion 64 X2 1.80GHz dual core processor and 2GB of RAM, but I usually sit at 20% CPU and 50% RAM with just MS Outlook and a couple browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, maybe Apple Safari 3) running. We’ll see how Xōbni performs.
*UPDATE 25.Sep.07* Well, I really like this application, but it’s a pretty serious consumer of computer resources (primarily RAM), so I un-installed it. I sent some comments off to the good folks at Xōbni. Hopefully, they will get things tightened up and I can give it another try.
