Xobni - Changing How You Use Your Inbox
I like to talk about innovate products and Xobni, the plugin for Outlook, definitely fits the bill. I blogged about Xobni on my NWW blog back in February and as you can tell from that post, I was and still am excited about Xobni. Unlike most things that get installed on my computer only to be removed a few days or weeks later, the "coolness" of Xobni hasn't worn off. More importantly the usefulness of Xobni causes me to have it stick around and take up real estate in my Outlook window. But Xobni isn't perfect, either. I see some real challenges to be able to truly gain the benefits it could bring to email, but we'll talk about that in a moment.
Here's a video tour of Xobni. Also check out my podcast interview with Matt Brezina, co-founder of Xobni. I'm starting to do more product reviews and strategy work as part of my Converging Network business, which is a pleasure since I enjoy working with and assessing new products and trends anyway.
(Contact me if you are interested in finding out more about my Converging Network product strategy services.)
Xobni - The Movie
Xobni - Email's New Connection To People
Now that Xonbi integrates with LinkedIn, I find that I use it a lot more. It's actually the little features I Xobni I like most. Showing someone's portrait loaded up on LinkedIn when I click on their email makes the connection to that person even more real. It makes email just a little more personal. And, if I don't know them well, it's easy to go learn about the person from their LinkedIn profile. (You have a LinkedIn profile with a picture uploaded don't you? Here's mine. Lets connect!)
One of the most useful things about Xobni is knowing the email habits of the people I converse and work with regularly. The little bar chart showing the distribution time of emails received from them throughout the day lets me know when they are more likely to read the emails I send, or take my call. This could also be invaluable to a sales person looking to reach clients, though I'm not sure people these days answer phone calls from people they don't know. (Sales people tell me virtually no one answers their business phone much any more.)
Xobni - Changing How You Use Email
It's rare for me to keep a gadget or plugin around for long. Their installed half-life is usually about 2 days, or no more than two weeks on my computers. So you know Xobni must be delivering something of value, especially given the screen real estate it takes in Outlook.
Changing how you use email is a double-edged sword, as I'll talk more about in a moment. I find the attachments ("Files Exchanged") section of the Xobni plug-in one if it's most useful functional features. It can prevent a lot of searching for the right email with the right attachment, and you can dig in deeper if you want to see the email or email thread the attachment was a part of.
I haven't found that I use the "XYZ's Network" section (where it shows you other people who have been in conversations with you and this person) as much as I thought I would. It's a great idea, but I just haven't added that capability into my email use thought patterns for some reason. The "Email Conversations" thread is also something that I don't use much, mostly because I don't find the way the threads are presented as being that useful. I'll say some more about this down below.
Xobni - Kudos For Being A Well Behaved Outlook Plugin
My first rule of all plugin is "be useful". I really don't need an Adobe Acrobat plugin for Outlook or PowerPoint. Is use the print driver to create pdf files. Same for screen captures. That's why I have SnagIt. So, unless there's a really good reason why this plugin is needed, don't create them in the first place, and certainly don't install them by default. Xobni definitely meets the "be useful" criteria.
The second rule is "don't create other problems". How many times does your Outlook crash because of some funky plugin or software incompatibly. It seems virtually guaranteed that if any other software other than Outlook touches your pst and ost files, you're doomed for the dreaded "Not Responding" message. I have to say that I've had relatively few problems with Xobni and Outlook. Not that its never happened, as I have encountered a few situations where Xobni had the files open that Outlook needs in order to start properly. But the problems and crashes have been very, very few.
Kudos to the Xobni team for figuring out how to do this. They should bottle up whatever they are doing and help all the other software guys figure out how to do the same.
Xobni - The Challenge Of Getting The Benefits
Xobni has two big challenges in my view. First, all of Xobni's capabilities are constrained by being in an Outlook sidebar plugin. There's limited screen real estate, and it's mostly vertical. Networks of people (lists), conversations (lists), viewing email threads, all have to be viewed in this small area and it does detract from its usability and usefulness. Because of this, I don't use the email threads feature much at all, and the relatively static content (time distribution bar graph, email stats, portrait and contact info) are the things I look at and use most. It's a tough row to hoe being in a sidebar and Xobni would be much more useful if it was integrated into the email client itself. Tell me again why Microsoft hasn't gobbled up Xobni by now? Hmm.
Xobni also implies multiple user behavior changes to access its benefits. We use email clients so frequently everyday, all through the day, that the use case habits we've formed with Outlook are hard very to break. Instead of sorting back and forth between sender and sent date in order to locate what I'm looking for, you have to break that habit and look in the Xobni sidebar for what you might hunting to find. You have to remember "oh, there's another way to find the last version of that attachment sent to Bob", and go over and use Xobni to do that. On the flip side, being an Outlook sidebar plugin is an advantage over being a separate application from Outlook all together.
Breaking patterns and habit changes are something every product faces to varying degrees, but email's so heavily used that those habits are more difficult to break.
Xobni - Conclusion: Download It. You'll Use It.
Download Xobni. I think that title pretty much sums it up.
