a seattle startup

Techcrunch & VentureBeat both wrote about a Xobni acquisition rumor today and I decided to dig up my draft Xobni review and finish the post. I got my Xobni invite about 2 weeks ago and installed it right away. After a week of use, I’m feel that existing features are a bit bare but see tremendous potential here to integrate social networks into Outlook. Here’re my initial thoughts on Xobni:

• The product is still in closed beta so it does run a little slow at times but not a huge issue
• During initial install, it goes through this one-time “sync” process and had me a little worried about privacy – “sync” strikes me as a cross device process and I wondered if any of my info/emails were uploaded to a server somewhere. After emailing feedback@Xobni.com, one of their “QA Rockstars” responded pretty quickly to assure me that no usage data or personal info is taken.

Features I like:

• Sidebar is clean and doesn’t take up too much space. I am using a 30″ Dell monitor but I think you’re fine on most widescreen LCDs and there is an option to minimize the sidebar
• The “Files Exchanged” section is by far my favorite – it’s saved me time looking for files when a contact calls to discuss. Our accountant called me the other day to discuss some files I sent him last week and I was quickly able to pull up the files I wanted. Downside is it’s linked to your email attachments, not the actual file stored on your computer so any edits I make requires me to Save As to the appropriate directory.
• “Conversations Panel” is also useful. It gives me a quick view of all emails exchanged with a specific contact in reverse chronological order. Saves me from having to use Outlook’s search function or scroll through my entire inbox.

Less useful features:

• “Contact’s Network” section of the Sidebar shows who you and your contact have both exchanged emails with. Because this info is only derived from emails that have passed through your inbox, I don’t see a huge benefit here because I’m not discovering new relationships that I wasn’t already aware of. That doesn’t mean I’d like to discover new relationships this way, I prefer to keep my emails private.
• “Xobni Analytics” is by far my least favorite. It’s scratching an itch that doesn’t exist. Stats like hourly mail traffic distributions and contacts by email volume are borderline interesting and not useful. Other stats such as Response Time doesn’t even make sense. What does it mean to have a 60day response time for Sunday? I have 2 email accounts in Outlook, one is a Pop mail account and the other is a Gmail IMAP account. For some reason, some stats only reflect the Pop account whereas others reflect both accounts. Might just be a beta bug.

High on potential:

Up to this point, Xobni isn’t a necessity – I’ve tested this by uninstalling Xobni and I don’t miss it. Nonetheless, I see tremendous potential in the product and would like to see greater integration with social media and social networks.

My friend Derek wrote a blog post today on “Get Stuff Done in Facebook“. Not surprisingly, people are spending more time on Facebook and unlikely getting much real work done unless you’re a marketer. After reading Derek’s post I caught the Xobni acquisition feeds in my Google Reader and thought to myself, why not “Get Social in Outlook”? Not many properties on the web are as sticky as Facebook & MySpace where users average 15min and 23min per stay respectively (according to Compete). Many users likely have multiple visits per day so average daily time on site is even higher.

What desktop application is most similar to Facebook & MySpace? Outlook! And Outlook is inherently social with high market penetration. If most people (excluding high school and college kids) are like me, I spend a lot more than 23min/day in Outlook and it’s the only application that I never close. This value of Outlook if huge because I can’t think of any other application or website that I never close and am constantly prompted with new mail notifications to focus on the app. Xobni has the potential to tap this value.

With a data point of one, myself, here’s how I think Xobni can become a necessity. My desktop is cluttered with IM clients, Twhirl and a browser window with tabs for Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. If I can consolidate my IM client, Twitter client, Facebook newsfeeds and FriendFeed updates into a Xobni style sidebar in Outlook, that would be golden!

Update: Xobni to integrate with Yahoo Mail according to this techcrunch post. This is really cool especially with the lack of IMAP support and YahooMail/Outlook integration options. I’m tempted to reinstall Xobni once this feature is live!

Earlier this week, Michael Arrington posted an article on TechCrunch complaining about the frustration of dealing with an overflow of emails (2,433 unread in his inbox to be exact). Though I don’t have that problem and am fairly diligent when it comes to responding to emails, I think it would be great to have Outlook auto-prioritize emails by keywords, contact, frequency of email exchanges with contacts, subject line, topics, etc.

Jealous Thankful that I don’t have 2,433 emails in my inbox, I ran into a similar problem in my Google Reader. After falling behind on one day or reading, I ended up with 1,000+ unread feeds the next morning.

Typically when this happens, I just scan through to my favorite feeds, scroll through a few unread articles, then click “Mark all as read” to start with a clean slate. Here’s a few problems with this method:

• I miss out on great articles in feeds outside of my 3-4 favorites
• Even in my favorite feeds, I end up wasting time glancing through entries I don’t particularly care for. I don’t have much interest in a random article on a stranger’s favorite music and I’m sure many people don’t really care about me bowling a 300 on Wii. Some blog entries are meant for close friends and a small niche of the readers.
• High volume feeds (e.g. Engadget, Gizmodo, KillerStartups) with 20-50 daily posts quickly become overwhelming and I quickly retreat to the “Mark all as read” button

So here’s another opportunity for an entrepreneur – make a feed reader that filters & prioritizes feeds based on user defined settings. I would like to see the following features:

• Feed ranking (allow users to rank their feeds)
• Keyword filters (e.g. Engadget.com – show me posts on PS3, Wii, Macs, Phones; I really don’t care about the Pleo, OLPCs or Chinese knock-offs)
• Tag filters (many bloggers have their own set of categories/tags for each post, I care about ‘startup advice’, don’t care about ‘tvshows’)
• Filter articles under a certain length (80% of the article under 200 words are crap, might as well use Twitter for those)
• After applying these user defined ranks & filters, group all these feeds into a single tab

If Google Reader has these functions, I’d almost pay to use it. If you know of a feed reader out there that already have these functions, please tell me (but don’t tell them I’d pay to use it). If you have any other ideas for features, I’d love to hear them in the comments.