[greatapps]

Homework? In the last blog post to which you refer I gave a personal account of the usefulness of Xobni to me, and wasn't presenting a research paper.

I'd be delighted to hear the ways you think they can monetise the product/feature, partly to demonstrate the amount of thought you've given the matter.

In its current incarnation, Xobni is a tool aimed at the individual user. Obviously, the company/product can go in all sorts of directions but so can anyone given time/money/effort.

Let's consider the possibility that their current offering is a prelude to looking at the corporate market. There are already tools that seek to discover corporate relationships at a macro level from data mining email inboxes, albeit they are only starting to make inroads into businesses. They work unobtrusively behind the scenes to provide business "intelligence" which can include highlighting colleagues who appear to have active communications with a "target".

You should also consider that many CRM tools already enable emails to be automatically incorporated into the communication profile/history of a contact, supplemented by richer tools than Xobni presently offer [task mgt, workflow] e.g. salesforce, zoho crm, siebel.

[wumi]

"'information' thrown up about email traffic."

you clearly still consider just the analytics part of the email, which shows you STILL probably haven't really used the product if that's all you think it is.

"While Xobni is focused for now on email organization for Outlook, it wants to be able to aggregate information from different webmail clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, and others. It also wants to bring in instant messaging, and aggregate information from social networks.

Brezina gave the example of a friend who remembers a story another friend related about a ski resort in Vermont. A user will be able to search Xobni’s database for “Stow,” the name of the ski resort, and instantly find all the related threads , conversations, and media traded with friends."

sounds a bit like useful social search to me.

and since you've already nixed advertising, and a saas model -- again based on apparently never trying the product

there's also freemium, support & service behind the product a la open source, cross-sales/ partnership with a CRM package (read: salesforce or zoho)

[greatapps]

I got my invite to trial the product on Dec 14 2007 and tested the Xobni service over a few weeks using Outlook 2003. I've also re-installed it recently, just in case there were new features which would change my views - not so far.

Several people have mentioned the requirement to aggregate across multiple webmail clients - I confess that I'm not affected by this as I consolidate multiple email accounts in one location and avoid the need to check separate email services individually. If operating on multiple webmail clients is common practice, then I confess to having been ignorant of this gap in the market - of course, people could consolidate their email in either Outlook or Gmail.

As for search, does Google Desktop search not work on your PC? It searches both within your email [certainly Outlook and Gmail] and across the filing system, whilst being free. This should go some way to addressing your example of locating conversations. As for the media attachments, I concede that I've long since stopped using my email inbox as a filing system, saving them off to file directories if they are important enough [Pst files in particular always seem to react badly].

[wumi]

I think there's a simple answer to this: the product doesn't suite you.

That's OK -- I'm sure Xobni's not crying about it.

Somehow you've translated Xobni not suiting you to Xobni not being worth $20 million.

That's OK too, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of start-ups following these threads, and I wouldn't expect any coming your way.