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Xobni users can now search their free Yahoo! Mail from inside the Xobni Outlook sidebar, view Facebook profile data, browse Hoover’s company profiles, and instantly initiate Skype chats and calls.
The official press release can be found here.
We have been quiet on our blog for a while, but the Xobni office has been buzzing away. Today we are launching the results of the last four months of hard work – Xobni has partnered with Yahoo! Mail, Facebook, Skype, and Hoover’s to bring in-depth relationship data and communication services into the Xobni Outlook sidebar. We have also extended our Linkedin integration, improved numerous elements of the Xobni interface, and made new steps in improving Xobni’s performance.
The new version (1.6.3) is available for immediate download
Current Xobni users will be automatically updated over the next several weeks. To force an upgrade immediately, please visit http://www.xobni.com/upgrade.php?version=5378
Here are four reasons to try the latest Xobni today:
1. Search your Yahoo! Mail without leaving Outlook
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2. Instant Facebook Status and Photos
Xobni’s sidebar displays key Facebook information to keep up with connections, including:
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3. Smart Skype Integration
Xobni’s sidebar now enables the following Skype functionality from within the sidebar:
Xobni’s sidebar also displays the following:
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4. Hoover’s arms you with instant research on your contacts’ employers
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As always, Xobni remains highly customizable so that you always have the power to choose the features and integrations that work for you.
Check out these cool new features in our latest product video
We continue to focus on improving the core Xobni experience and improving the existing features our users have come to love. Today’s announcement reiterates our commitment to providing context and efficiency to your email relationships.
Please helps us spread the word about Xobni and these great new features by Digging this blog post here: http://digg.com/microsoft/Xobni_did_it_4_reasons_your_Outlook_will_never_be_the_same
Thanks!
The Xobni Team
thunderbird???????????????????
Skype integration is cool.
I don’t get it — all these new features are verging on the fringe….
I mean, how will you make money off the product?
I had high hopes for xobni when it first came out. But after using it for a few days and realizing that it will not track emails that you read in your inbox and then delete it became useless for me. *Every* email that hits the inbox should be tracked.
These new additions are awesome! I’d love them in google mail (which we also use at our company Tipjoy).
I used google video chat yesterday for an hour long video conference. It was amazing and better than skype in my experience.
I would work on your color palette though. It’s currently very bright and loud – drawing the user’s attention and likely masking some data in the process.
Stan, you can add “deleted” folder to indexing in the Options menu. It is just off by default as most users don’t use the deleted folder like you are using it.
New features are great and all, but the performance drag that Xobni put on my Outlook performance was too painful, and I eventually ended up removing it a couple weeks ago.
I really miss it, though – have you done anything to make performance better?
FYI : The email that went out to existing users about the upgrade is getting flagged as SPAM since the msg doesn’t have a valid FROM email address. If you want to get the word-out, make sure your emails get marked up accordingly.
I’ve received 5 copies of the Xobni email this morning (so far), I would have replied to complain about it but, like Raymon said, it’s missing a From: name. It also uses an HTML entity in a plain text e-mail (and the wrong one at that — don’t use a right single quote when you really mean apostrophe! they may look similar but they are not the same thing)
Also frustrating that I have now received the announcement email 4 times.
i use xobni more than any other app on my pc. BUT i will NOT “upgrade” from 1.2.3 because of the piss poor location of the task bar slider/minimizer (bottom left). that purple search icon is completely useless and imo is where that minimizer button should be. yes i use it that much.
i shudder at the thought some idiot wants every inbox email tracked. Stan, you dont get alot of email daily do you. Have you heard of folders? If you delete emails because of the convenience of hitting the delete button (im guessing to mark that you read it, i have heard of morons doing this) why dont you create a rule to move read emails to a folder.
I can go 20 minutes max before Xobni hoses Outlook.
Hi, thanks for notifying us of the email delivery problem. We are working to solve the problem as we speak. Again, i’m very sorry for anyone that received multiple emails from us.
-Matt
Does this release include an option to work with a corporate firewall? The new functionality is nice, but useless to me until I can get out.
10 copies of this email notification and counting
I’m sorry to those users that received multiple announcement emails from us this morning. We have fixed the problem with our mail server that has caused multiple emails to be sent to our mailing list subscribers. We have stopped the server that sends emails to our mailing list subscribers.
We’re very sorry for the hassle this caused some of you this morning. Believe me, this is not the way we wanted to announce the great new features that we hope you will all enjoy in this new version of Xobni.
Thank you for continuing to support us.
Sincere apologies,
Matt Brezina
Co-founder, Xobni
I had just opened outlook after a clean install of Vista and my inbox had 10 messages from Xobni. I thought it was spam until I read the above posts. Thanks for fixing the problem.
New features are cool, but seriously, when are you guys going to support clients other than Outlook? I dumped it more than a year ago for good.
very cool….but how do you make money as a company?
Any performance upgrades?
Xobni slows my computer down badly. If this release doesn’t include any performance upgrades, then your next should. Trust me, your hardcore users will appreciate it
@cycloscott Some of these features won’t work behind a corporate firewall (i.e. facebook), other we expect will (i.e. yahoo mail). Please share your experiences with us as corporate firewalls vary and we’d be interested to hear how xobni works in your situation.
@Bob We are focused on being the best outlook integrated application in the world first. We won’t stop until we’ve achieved that. After we have, we have plans for taking xobni data and the xobni experience to many new clients and environments
@Mike We will be offering a premium product next year. Please follow here on our blog for the announcement
@Rishi There are users that experience performance issues with Xobni. And we know that all users would always appreciate making the core application faster. It can never be too fast. This is the #1 focus of our development team now that we’ve launched these integrations. We’ve already made huge improvements that aren’t launched yet, but expect them soon.
I miss Xobni. I had to uninstall it because of its incompatibility with ClearContext. Does the new version address this?
@Matt
My likeliest use for firewall access would be to integrate with LinkedIn. The only message I see when in Profile View is ‘No profile availabe’ next to the LinkedIn logo.
nice set of features..but I think Skype integration and Yahoo mail search will be more useful..rest looks fancy..
@David To get Xobni and Clearcontext to play nice, install the new version of clearcontext. We worked with them to make sure the new version of clearcontext works with Xobni
@cycloscott – i’m afraid that yes, your company is blocking linkedin, and therefore we won’t be able to display that data for you. Tell your IT department LinkedIn is a powerful tool that makes you better at your job! And, tell them, it makes Xobni better, so you want it
@Matt Thanks! I hadn’t received an official announcement from either ClearContext or Xobni, and these two together are a powerful duo for Outlook. I followed your instructions and have the latest versions of both running successfully. So far so good. Again, thanks.
There doesn’t seem to be any clear information on what privacy I’m surrendering to xobni if I log into facebook and allow the xobni facebook app access to my account.
For instance: there is no email address connection between my corporate email address and my FB account, and (hopefully) no unique identifier between FB and the information Xobni has access to.
If I set up the FB tab (grant access to the xobni FB app)
(a) does this associate my outlook email address with my FB account for other Xobni users’ lookup?
(b) does this give people who are not on my friends list any access to profile information that they would not otherwise get through this Xobni connection?
As one of many privacy-minded users who like to keep their professional and private lives separate, I’d like to understand what I would be getting myself into here. Thanks!
I can go 10minutes max before Xobni crashes Outlook.
@Chris During the install we explain the privacy associated with 3rd party services like linkedin. We will work to make this more clear on other parts of our website.
This is what you will find during the install of xobni:
Xobni sends an encrypted email address to Facebook to retrieve the Facebook profile for the person who is currently being viewed in the Xobni sidebar. Your own Facebook profile is never altered by Xobni, and all Facebook privacy settings are strictly followed when viewing other profiles.
Click here for more information regarding Facebook’s Privacy Policy.
So (a) we never alter anything about your facebook profile. If you don’t put in your work address to facebook, that address will never be used by xobni.
And (b) we never change the privacy settings of your account. Facebook doesn’t allow it and we’d never want to do that. So, this feature doesn’t give non-facebook friends any information they can’t according to your facebook privacy settings.
I’m with @Chris and @Giordano.
I am concerned about privacy issues and want to opt out of most of the features. Will I be able to do that?
Xobni is forever crashing my computer and Outlook (Windows XP). Drives me insane.
But I love the application so please fix this problem.
I have read this post. This is very much true. Even I own a blog account on video conferencing. Video conferencing is indeed a great innovation in technology and communications. One day video conferencing will be like an ordinary house-hold item in the next 5-10 years.I will mention your post in my blog.
why not improve the stablity and performance first? integration with facebook and ymail, skype are cool… but the basic function should work…. it was slow and crashed a few times before I have to remove it..
Guys…does this work on MS Outlook 2000 also?
Manish, yes, we support Outlook 2000
You guys lost the corporate userbase with adding third party integration, especially of such insecure products as Skype. Not even mentioning the fact that it looks completely unprofessional, integration with third party IM clients, and no integration with corporate solutions such as OCS basically closes the door for your application into any enterprise. Which is very unfortunate because email and contact search is far superior to any other desktop search applications out there… but I cannot approve this app for my users, if it’s going to act as a stepping stone for YIM, Skype and other consumer-level idle-ware.
Oh yeah, we were talking about us Xobni Incorporates with my Facebook Profile Yahoo Mail and Skype Featured Windows Download Wednesday November 19th 2008 10 43 am  Author admin Windows only Previously mentioned free Microsoft Outlook plug in Xobni is a must have for anyone looking to get more from Outlook and today the plug in gets even better.
I am really excited about using this product as I manage heaps of emails every day – the statistics, quick search and links to social networking functions are really attractive… BUT … you guys have to fix the memory leaks/issues with the product. I sit watching my processes via task manager as the Outlook plugin gobbles up all remaining system memory, forcing me to close Outlook. I’ve had to disable Xobni until you can resolve this issue.
I too am having issues working with Xobni behind a corporate firewall.
For FB and LinkedIn I just get timeout issues. For Twitter I get: Unexpected Authentication Response (407).
For Yahoo! When I try to enable it says: Xobni could not access the Yahoo! sign in servers. Please make sure your Internet connection is working, and try again later.
For the connectivity issues, we generally work well with firewalls if you can already access the third-party sites in the browser. What is usually more restrictive is application level blocking by VPN clients, as well as some proxy servers. The former appears to block HTTP requests, so the only way around it is to either disconnect from VPN or ask your IT person to enable it. For proxies we have a similar need for IT to make sure requests are passed both ways. If IT is wary of supporting the app, you might want to point them to Xobni Enterprise:
http://www.xobni.com/enterprise
Thanks,
Eirik