Xobni competes with Rapportive (my favorite to date) and Gist, which was recently acquired by Blackberry company RIM. Another service called eTacts (site now down) was recently acquired by Salesforce. Xobni was funded by Blackberry Partners a year ago, but remains independent. Check out the screenshot below to get a feel for how it looks, what it offers and how it's different.

You can see that Xobni adds a number of details to your Gmail sidebar interface, including a profile photo of whoever is emailing you, their job title via LinkedIn, their phone number (awesome!), a graph showing how often you've been in contact with them over time and people who often show up in email threads with you and this person.

The ability to quickly glance at the sidebar of an email and gain a deeper understanding of who it is that's emailed you is really incredible. I've used Rapportive for a long time now, which offers something very similar. I hate using email without it. Give Xobni for Gmail a try, I think you'll probably like it.

Here's what we wrote about the emergence of email as a platform last Summer, when Rapportive became generally available:

We've been waiting for years for email to emerge as a platform. The key enabling factor that has now emerged is a secure way to grant temporary access to the contents of your email to trusted developers out in the larger ecosystem of people and companies who want to build these new services - all without ever giving them your precious email password.

Yahoo's Eran Hammer-Lahav: "It's pretty clear that email provides a huge potential for extensibility, given the wide range of ways people use it. The inbox is much more than just a place for incoming mail, it is the primary dashboard for many web users - it is how they manage their lives.

"So when looking at email as a platform, the opportunity of making it more useful and productive reaches most areas of online activities.

"So far the focus has been on taking social information to help better manage email overflow, but the platform has much more potential beyond that."

These kinds of apps are just the beginning, but Xobni is pretty well-developed for an email sidebar. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

MailBrowser is currently only compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox on the Mac (OSX 10.5 and higher) and Windows, though the team is working on Safari and Chrome versions as well.

The plugin offers a rich set of features, including support for multiple Gmail and Google Apps accounts and rich previews of attachments. Another nice feature is the "trend" section that appears at the bottom of the sidebar. Here, two graphs show a timeline view of how many emails you sent and received from any given contact.

MailBrowser stores all your data locally on your hard disk, so no information is ever shared with the service. Because all the data is stored locally, MailBrowser also keeps a copy of all your attachments on your machine. The application also syncs all the data back to Google Contacts in the cloud, so any changes you make on one computer will automatically appear on another machine.

Xobni for Gmail

In many respects, MailBrowser is very similar to Xobni - a popular Outlook addon. Xobni, however, puts a stronger emphasis on giving you additional information about a contact by looking at the contact's social networking profiles. MailBrowser plans to add this functionality in a future version. Currently, the service can only display details about a contact's domain and website.

More Features Coming Soon

MailBrowser has big plans for the future. The company plans to offer support for more services (Yahoo Mail, Live Mail, etc.), integration with enterprise apps like Salesforce and integration with social media services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Verdict

For now, MailBrowser works just as advertised. It doesn't yet offer the rich feature set of Xobni, but the company is clearly working on that.

If you have a very large mailbox, it can take a while for MailBrowser to download and index your information. Luckily, the download process starts with your most recent email, so that you can be up and running long before your last email has been downloaded.

With Xobni Enterprise, I.T. admins can manage the deployment and permissions surrounding the plugin's use via a web-based portal that provides access to user's profiles as well as a groups management feature. By placing different subsets of users into groups, I.T. can deploy custom versions of the plugin to different users. For example, everyone company-wide may get a plugin that offers LDAP integration, but only sales professionals would receive the version that connects to Salesforce. Admins can also choose to "switch off" other previously default integrations such as the Facebook and Twitter extensions.

To push the plugin out to end users, Xobni Enterprise offers an MSI file and registry settings that can be modified as necessary.

Extensions for Salesforce, SharePoint, and More

At launch time, Xobni's Solution Provider Program has partnered with a number of Enterprise vendors to provide extensions and integrations for their new system. The current list of partners includes Atlius Consulting, Cogent, Echo Lane and Interdyne BMI, which help Xobni integrate SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce CRM platforms among others.

The new service also comes with an Extensions Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows in-house developers to write their own extensions to integrate other platforms beyond those which are currently available. Xobni suggests this SDK could be used to deliver company news and information from an internal corporate portal, specific business application, or any other web service.

Other Features

Another general enhancement available with this version of the plugin is Xobni's expanded search capabilities that allows users to search calendar appointments, tasks and archived PST files. The search feature includes advanced filters which let users find results by limiting searches to email contents only or the To:, From:, and  or Subject: fields of their email messages. Users can also access their entire contact database from the auto-complete field in Outlook's "Compose" window.

Pricing

The company webpage for Xobni Enterprise does not include any pricing information, only a link to "Request More Info" from the company. This is likely because each Xobni system is being somewhat custom-built in terms of price because there are additional costs to run the pre-defined extensions created by the company. Depending on which extensions a company chooses to deploy and however many users will be using them, the overall cost of the Xobni Enterprise system will vary. However, the company informs us that the system starts at $30 per user per year with volume discounts available.

Xobni has seen over 3 million downloads of their plugin, including both free and paid versions, since their initial debut. This new offering represents the second revenue stream for the company, the first being the launch of Xobni Plus, a premium version of the plugin that sells for $29.95. They also claim to have a presence in 80% of Fortune 500 companies thanks to employee adoption outside of the traditional I.T. infrastructure, a trend known as self-provisioning and one that has steadily increased over the years.

Companies looking to maintain control over what their employees can do on their company computers often end up having no choice but to purchase the enterprise services provided by the startups their employees are already using in order to once again centralize control within I.T. If Xobni's adoption across the enterprise is as strong as they claim, they may soon have several companies looking to implement the Xobni Enterprise Service so they can do just this. Other companies may be tempted to try the product for the first time now that it offers I.T. friendly tools and enterprise level support.

More information about Xobni Enterprise is available here on the company's website.

Since its launch in early 2008, the software has been offered as a free download to anyone looking to capitalize on the hidden social network in their inbox. But in March of this year, we got wind that things were going to change when Xobni announced their plans to work on a premium version after receiving a new round of funding.

What's Worth Paying For? Xobni Says Search

It's interesting that the company thinks the critical missing feature that users will be willing to pay for is search, especially since Microsoft Outlook includes some pretty robust search tools of its own. In Outlook 2007, for example, a user can configure "Search Folders" which let you easily create a custom query for things like "mail from specific people" or "mail with attachments" or anything else you can dream up. Outlook also offers instant search that finds and highlights keywords in your messages. More recently, though, you may have heard of another popular search feature when Google broke it: Windows Desktop Search. Outlook ties into this search service which lets the Windows OS index your emails so computer-wide searches will also return email results.

So how is Xobni going to improve on the built-in capabilities of Outlook? Essentially, by adding tools and features that make email search more like cramming a real search engine into your inbox.

New Features in Plus

Xobni Plus's query builder makes it easier to configure advanced queries -similar to how search folders might operate. However, unlike search folders, these queries can be built on the fly for one-time use, not saved forever as a new Outlook folder. You can search for exact phrases or keywords and you can even perform Boolean queries.

Xobni is also letting you search entire conversation threads at once instead of having to search your entire inbox or a particular folder, as in Outlook. And thankfully, you can now search through archived PSTs, too. 

Another new search feature is the ability to search calendar appointments and tasks, an interesting choice for a premium product since Outlook's own instant search feature is available in all Mail views, including Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks.

The only feature debuting in Xobni Plus that's not really about building a specific search query is AutoSuggest. However, it's somewhat search-related. If you've ever forgotten the name or email of someone you need to contact, remembering only that they work at a specific company for example, you can use this feature to type in what you can remember (like the company name) and Xobni will display all matching results ranked on how often you and that person communicate. That's a big improvement on the typical autocomplete functionality found in most email clients today.

Why Pay When Outlook Includes Search of Its Own?

Despite some similarities between Outlook's native features and Xobni, the improvement here is Xobni's easier-to-use UI that places everything you need in its sidebar. Also, it's worth noting that Outlook's own search may be a headache for some users, especially if you go by the top Google results for "Outlook 2007 search" which returns tons of links like "search problem," "fix for slow instant search," and "search busted."

Now that the premium software is available, the question is whether or not Outlook users are really struggling so much with Outlook's own search features that they would be willing to pay nearly $30 for these improvements. (Our guess is that they are.) We're a little surprised that the Plus offering didn't incorporate more "social" features, like improvements to their Facebook integration or some sort of microblogging functionality, but we suppose that at the end of the day these sorts of things are probably less useful to the business user than simply finding email fast is.

To buy the new version of Xobni Plus, you can go here.

In this release, Xobni has also included additional user controls which will allow users to better customize Xobni's behavior. This feature is designed to help people with "underpowered" computers to take advantage of the plugin. (Can we say netbooks?) The controls let you customize the indexing times and configure a delayed load when Outlook starts, among other things. Although we never did formal tests on the Xobni plugin ourselves besides just using it on our own machines (where it performed just fine), we heard of some anecdotal evidence where people had claimed it slowed Outlook down. For those who reported the slowness issues, these performance enhancements and configuration tools will likely be a great benefit.

As for the funding, the company says the money will be used for continuing development of the product and will help them proceed with work on a premium version of the software, slated for release this summer. The investment from BlackBerry Partners Fund brings the total raised in Xobni's Series B funding to over $10 million and adds BlackBerry Partners Fund Partner, Rick Segal, to Xobni's board of directors. Xobni closed the first part of the Series B in January 2009, led by Cisco Systems ($5 million).

You can download the new version of Xobni here.

Xobni, a company obviously catering to business users, have, as of today, launched a new version of their Outlook plugin. Needless to say, the Xobni team really knows their audience because this new version is offering built-in support for LinkedIn, the social network designed for business use.

With the new LinkedIn integration, Xobni now automatically shows a contact's current employer, job title, link to their LinkedIn profile, and contact photo in the app's sidebar. This is especially helpful for those who receive a lot of email from new contacts or have a hard time putting a face to name. Along with the LinkedIn support, Xobni still offers their core features - fast people and attachment search, threaded conversations, and automatic contact profiles.

Download Xobni

Xoopit

Depending on how comfortable you are handling over your email login information, you may find Xoopit either a major security risk or one of the more useful web applications you've seen in a long time. Marshall has argued that Xoopit is proof that Gmail needs a better API, but I decided to throw caution to the wind and use Xoopit anyway because...well...finding attachments is hard.

The service, which came out of private beta just last week, offers a Gmail plugin that lets you search your inbox for photos, videos, and files - all of which are accessible with one click from the new toolbar added to the top of your Gmail inbox. You can also use the addon to find photos, videos, or files sent you by a specific person, and, as you type their name in the box provided, Xoopit helpfully auto-completes the entry.

On the Xoopit homepage, things get a little more interesting. Here, the latest items from your email display in a familiar lifestream-like view that practically has you looking for the "like" button. To the side of the screen, the people who send you the most items are listed and linked to - and those results may surprise you, bringing new insight into what's really going on in your inbox. (Forwarders of chain emails be warned - you've been identified!)

At the time of launch, the Xoopit addon, which is available as a Firefox plugin, did not support Firefox 3, but over the weekend, the Xoopit team added that support, which now makes it worth a download...at least for those who aren't too security conscious.

Download Xoopit

For a demo of Xoopit, you can check out this video:

Upgrading the Inbox

Considering how much of our days, if not our lives, are spent dealing with the non-stop influx of email, it's nice to see some applications that are helping us make our inboxes more efficient while also mining them for important data. Microsoft Outlook, due to its nature of being desktop software, has always lent itself to the addition of plugins - even social ones like OutSync (facebook/Outlook sync) - but the idea of adding plugins to our web inboxes is still relatively new territory.

Because so many people use Gmail, we've seen the innovation begin there. First there was Gina Trapani's Better Gmail Firefox plugin, which arose from a collection of Greasemonkey scripts. Then even Google's Gmail team got in on the act earlier this month with their launch of Gmail Labs, the experimental features you can enable from your "Settings" page. Although some of those features are certainly less useful than others, the fact that Google is also hopping into the inbox addon game means there is definitely growing interest in this area (and say what you want - those "superstars" are really helpful).

Hopefully, the growth in this area will continue and we'll soon find that Google Labs, Xobni, and Xoopit were just the forerunners of the upgraded inbox trend.

Xobni initially launched in September 2007 at the TechCrunch40 Conference. After being downloaded thousands of times in the hours after launch, they closed the doors and went into a private beta period. During this time, they kept the number of beta testers low while focusing on refining Xobni's features and responding to user feedback. Some of these adjustments were documented on the company's blog, like the removal of the "organize" tab from Xobni's UI, which was decided to be too much of a distraction to the core product.

Back in January, we noted that their blog had hinted at expanding beyond Outlook to other platforms, but, besides a clever April Fool's Day prank where they announced support for Pine email, no additional news regarding future supported platforms has been announced. While this leaves many email users in the cold, for those who work in the corporate world - where Outlook is still heavily used - Xobni's public beta will be of great help, allowing them to quickly find and expose the data trapped in their inbox.

To gain access to the public beta, just visit the Xobni homepage. You can also learn more about Xobni via the video below: