Apologies for the extended delay in posting my thoughts on Xobni.  I have been using it since the first cycle of an exceptionally well run beta program started and have been collecting some thoughts over time.  I appreciate being given some early beta invites and dutifully distributed them making some new friends along the way.  I still have some if you’d like to take it for a spin.  Just shoot me an email – robertcpease at gmail dot com.

Recently the company has had some departures from the early executive team.  Not uncommon, but this is pretty early in the lifecycle of a company with momentum and is curious to say the least.  What I mean by momentum is that having Bill Gates demo your product as a brand new and unknown company is not a common occurrence.  The turnover could be the result of a new CEO and a company trying to move from being "clever" to being real, but is worth noting nonetheless.

First off, I am a huge believer in both how bad the email problem is for the enterprise as well as the potential that awaits those companies that come up with a way to improve it.  The challenge is to significantly improve it, not focus on replacing it or just rethinking the construct of the inbox. 

Email is way too pervasive and ingrained in all major workflows from selling to support and it will be many moons until the Facebook generation eradicates it from the workplace.  Also, for full disclosure, I spend time and energy on this topic thinking about the business opportunities that could be pursued.

Here's what I like:

• Great initial marketing and buzz
• Locating attachments
• Usable placement on the Outlook UI (expand/collapse)
• Conversation threading
• Search that is interesting and faster than Outlook search (even though it essentially the same searching)

Not so wild about:

• A quick key to draft an email that asks for a phone number that drops a bit of promotional text below the signature block that is not really appropriate in business setting.           

                 Build your address book with less effort – http://www.xobni.com/GetTheDigits

• The "Schedule time" quick key sends a clever email with time slots for the next few days with the same cheesy promotional text at the bottom but the available times are not tied into my actual calendar or reflecting true availability requiring me to still switch between my calendar and the email I am sending to get accurate availability.
• Single channel/single platform – email only and MS Outlook only (Yahoo Is apparently in the works)
• Analytics that are interesting but not meaningful.  Time of day by contact not meaningful and the graphic in the side bar seems like filler.

At this point and after using it for many months, I have not integrated it directly into my daily workflow.  I still use the calendar tab to schedule a meeting and I still use "new" to start a new email.  I did use it the other day to quickly find a phone number for someone not in my contacts.  Xobni extracted it and made it easier for me to find – definitely a time savings but I still could have found it without the tool after a bit of digging. 

A quick word about Outlook latency:  there are lots of things going on when starting, using, and closing Outlook even without a plug-in and that goes for any plug-in.  When I first loaded the beta version, I had some issues that they quickly resolved with subsequent releases and an uninstall/install on my part.   This is why you conduct a beta program – to see what will happen when it is used on a larger scale than your dev/QA environment. 

Their plug-in is not the only application (beta or otherwise) now fighting for control of Outlook as it starts on my desktop as I have Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, and a handful of other alpha/beta products vying for processor time.

On the analytics front, I learned about needing to make email data really meaningful doing email analysis at both Orchestria and MessageGate.  The data on its own is interesting but even more interesting when taken in context – a new recipient, an email without text and an attachment, concentrations of traffic of certain file types, etc.  Granted, my previous efforts focused on compliance issues but the need for relevance is the same if you are talking about supervisory review or personal use. 

All said, I like Xobni and look forward to seeing it evolve but don't think I'd pay for it assuming that is a milestone in their business plan.  If it becomes part of MS Outlook then I guess that is not an issue as that will open a huge distribution channel.

My view is not as harsh as Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg but I still think focusing solely on making the inbox better doesn’t solve the problem.

Here's a story from Inc. magazine titled "Email's Little Helpers." After getting past the extremely corny name, there is a decent listing of a handful of tools that are designed to make the email experience better in some way.

Among those listed are Xobni and ClearContext. I have beta versions of both of these tools and am trying to use them in my daily activities. I have a review of Xobni in process and will post it shortly.

Also mentioned are freebie file transfer service YouSendIt and one that I had not heard of called Reply to All Monitor. Love the name but not sure I'd shell out $14.95 to keep me from a mistaken reply all email. YouSendIt is further commoditizing the file transfer space by making transfers of up to 100MB free with fee-based services starting above that or for more "secure" (password protected) transmission.

Most of these tools are focused on enriching the inbox or mail client experience and I believe are not really getting at the core problem with email. They focus on making the existing approach more efficient through things like better search vs. getting at the root cause issues like volume and relevance.