Please elaborate on the many things you evidently think it could be, highlighting how easily and in what timeframe they could achieve this, thereby "educating" the rest of us?
It may be time to put down the hatorade for a minute, and consider that the guys who walked away from $20m may be intelligent enough to value their own product.
Amen. I'm not eval'ing their move one way or the other, but I would suspect that they have more inside info about their company, product, the deal and business plan. By definition, you know.
I can't tell from your reply if an obnoxious personality is coming through, or if it's just the problem with ASCII communications.
---
Email is a very target rich environment, I've done quite a lot of work in this area and I think there are two key things to realize about email:
1. Mining the content of emails can give you information about what's in them and the person who wrote them. Examples are any spam filter, POPFile, GMail ads., automatic email response systems.
2. Email also contains relationship information. And this information doesn't need to be gathered by forcing the user to 'friend' people.
If you have access to the email box of a user you have all their email which means all their relationships plus all the subjects they are interested in. If you then do that across a company (or another group) you have a great deal of information for clustering (both by relationship and by content).
You also have IP addresses which leads to physical location (with some degree of error) and time information (including time zones).
That's a great deal of information to have (for example, companies like Facebook would love to know as much about you as possible but only really get the friend relationship; email gives you that effortlessly with content th analyze).
The obvious follow up on this is 'how are they going to make money'. I don't know Xobni so I can't answer for them, but if you look at the areas where money as been made analyzing content or relationships, it's not hard to see that Xobni could be a trojan horse (an Outlook or other email pluging) that gives the user some value while providing greater value behind the scenes.
My comment wasn't intended to be either obtuse or obnoxious. I was merely asking for an elaboration - its too easy to say there are lots of xxxxxx, but without evidencing what they are.
On your point about the aggregation of such data across a company, I concur. In a thread above, I did note that their current offering may be prelude to looking at the corporate market. However, this is not virgin territory as 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".
Surrendering such data to your employer is one thing. However, you allude to an interesting notion, namely Xobni perhaps aggregating and making use of data from the individual in the personal market. That could be a very tough sell amidst probable privacy concerns, but of keen interest to an advertiser at the very least.