Last week NPR ran a series of stories dealing with email and how it affects our lives. I find it interesting that many of us have shied away from Web 2.0 while clinging to our inbox as the primary method of communication. Well, the days of keeping our email in the 1.0 world may be coming to and end — social networking is coming to email.
One of the products featured in last weeks stories was Xobni (inbox spelled backwards). Xobni claims:
“Xobni offers a new way to organize and search your Outlook email. Xobni creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments. Our users tell us that Xobni makes your inbox work the way your mind does”
According to Newsweek:
“Bill Gates called Xobni the next generation of social networking.”
Basically, Xobni is trying to allow you to manage your email the way that you manage your relationships. It is a Outlook plugin that provides additional functionality. In the series of stories from NPR many of the themes centered around the increasing amount email we all receive, how much time they consume, and how companies are trying to deal with the problem.
Bart