ReadWriteWeb

Last night 500 Startups co-hosted an event called Inbox Love on the Google campus that brought together a number of entrepreneurs and companies who are working in the email space. The night featured several ignite talks, starting with Google's Stephanie Hannon who gave a post-mortem on Google Wave's attempts to revolutionize email and ending with Facebook developer Joel Seligstein who spoke about Monday's launch of its new messaging system. Being in company like Facebook and Google may be a little daunting for startups who too are attempting to address some of the problems surrounding email.

But if you need still more reasons why launching an email startup may be an uphill battle, Bijan Marashi can list them for you. Marashi is the co-founder and former CEO of Xoopit, an email indexing service that was acquired by Yahoo last year.

Xoopit, the Gmail plugin that helps you rediscover the lost photos, videos, and files in your Gmail inbox has just announced their new "Facebook meets Gmail" feature. With this addition, Xoopit users can both see and set Facebook status messages from within their Gmail inbox as well as view the profile photos and status messages of their Facebook friends while reading their email.

Earlier this year, we covered the launch of Xobni, an inbox add-on for Microsoft Outlook. This application is designed to tap into the hidden social network everyone uses: their inbox. More recently, another inbox addon called Xoopit came onto the scene. This one is for your Gmail inbox and provides a way to find files, photos, videos...and people, although that feature is not as obvious. Both of these applications are extending the possibilities of the inbox while turning them into hubs for for our real-life social connections.