6 ms·

Xobni brings Google Gadgets to Microsoft Outlook

25 points by aston 16y ago

brezina 16y ago
This announcement means that a developer can build a gadget for gmail using Google's APIs, and Xobni will fully support that Google API to bring the same gadget into Outlook. Build once and deploy to both gmail & Outlook More here: http://www.xobni.com/developer http://www.xobni.com/developer And feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to learn more
- jpcx01 16y ago
  All 600 million outlook users... bit of a stretch eh? Having a few million Xobni installs is pretty good, why not just advertise that?
  - brezina 16y ago
    Yikes dude - you are all over this thread. the total addressable market of gmail is around 120M mailboxes. Building a gadget won't get you all of those users, you'll still need to convince them to add your gadget. Same thing goes for Outlook, yet it the market is bigger. There are 600M Outlook users, and over 5M xobni downloads, but you'll still have to convince users to add your gadget. Xobni will just make it super easy for you to take the gadget you made for gmail, and provide the same functionality to your Outlook users. Some of those users will be provided by Xobni. And some of those users will be introduced to Xobni & your gadget by the gadget developer. The point is this provides access to a huge market with very little effort.
    - jpcx01 16y ago
      Spent a few weeks building a gadget so I have a few opinions on the matter :-). The point of the post was to clarify that you guys are enabling people to plug into your plugin. So the addressable market is the few million people who are actively using Xobni. Not all 600 million outlook users. Now if you guys provided a redistributable that allowed me to package up my Gadget and ACTUALLY sell to all 600million outlook users, that would catch my attention. But one caveat is it would need to allow for the actual Xobni mining stuff (the memory/cpu hog) to be toggled on/off, but still allow for the contextual gadget to show up. I like what you guys are doing, and will probably participate. However, just had to let out a few gripes first ;-)
      - brezina 16y ago
        Awesome - We definitely make Xobni redistributable by partners. Email me matt at companyname. We'd love to help make this a success for you.
pazpaz 16y ago
one step closer to googol-sized acquisition. make it so brezina.
jpcx01 16y ago
Thats great, but the devil's in the details. Are you using the same Extractors API so it'll inspect the messages and provide matches?
- brezina 16y ago
  Yes. We support the exact same google Extractors API, so you'll have all the info you need to show relevant context to the message.
  - jpcx01 16y ago
    Umm, not according to your docs. http://www.xobni.com/support/?view=192 http://www.xobni.com/support/?view=192 Recipient extractors are a tad bit important. No doubt its coming soon on your dev roadmap though.
    - brezina 16y ago
      We support the most important recipient extractor RecipientEmailExtractor - which gives you all recipients in both the to and cc field. We don't support RecipientToEmailExtractor and RecipientCCEmailExtractor right now, but we will with tonight's release.
      - jpcx01 16y ago
        Ah, cool. That'll work.
viksit 16y ago
Good stuff. Does this also clear up a path for a Xobni plus type gadget for use within Gmail (or google apps, more likely)? I'm guessing it could be monetized in the same fashion as the outlook tools are.
justlearning 16y ago
I tried Xobni (post yahoo acquiring) in a 'corporate setup' and found it to be a memory hog, The startup time is ridiculous with increasing mailbox size. I am better off searching outlook based on filters than using Xobni. And now adding more gadgets to outlook will just make it an obese guy in designer clothes. I wonder who uses Xobni? Any genuine Xobni users here?
- jamesbkel 16y ago
  Really? I haven't noticed it to be a resource hog and I find the search to be worlds better than Outlook, which some how manages to miss the obvious yet find the obscure every time I search. My mailbox is a pretty good size, but perhaps I haven't reached that threshold yet.
  - nhebb 16y ago
    Outlook, which some how manages to miss the obvious I've noticed a quirk in Outlook 2007 that if I add an extra character to the search then hit backspace, it will find items it didn't find before.
- adamsmith 16y ago
  If you tried it right after we added Yahoo Mail support, that must have been 2008. We made a ton of performance improvements in early 2009. I talked about that process, and the fun of developing in Outlook, here: http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2009/04/investing-a-million-bucks-into-performance-and-stability.html http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2009/04/investing-a-million-bucks-i... folks on Outlook 2007 will also find a huge OL performance boost from upgrading to SP2, wherein the fixed about thirty Outlook perf bugs, some of which can be tickled by their addin API's!
- RichardPrice 16y ago
  I use Xobni a lot. The two things I find it very valuable for are: - seeing the Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter profiles of people who email me. Adding some social context to the emails that come into my inbox is really great. - easily finding someone's phone number. Xobni automatically extracts people's phone numbers from the emails in your inbox, so I often find that if I want to get someone's number, I'll search for their name in the Xobni pane in Outlook, and the person's number will be right there. I haven't found any performance issues at all. Outlook for me is just as fast as it is without Xobni.
iamelgringo 16y ago
I really like Xobni, guys. I'm seriously thinking of dropping Gmail for my day to day use, and using Outlook + Xobni. Gmail's contact management sucks after you pass 200 or so contacts. Your contact management is really really cool. If you guys built an Android app, I'd eagerly pay $15 bucks or so for it, and I'd happily make the complete transition from Gmail to Outlook + you guys. Just a thought.... Feel free to ping me if you are interested in talking to a motivated customer.
aditya 16y ago
How is this different from using the Outlook Social Connector (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c87e257c-d76f-4785-a09b-af36babd6e32&displaylang=en http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c87...) - and why would you want to use a layer in the middle (Xobni) other than for portability? Will there be performance issues?
- brezina 16y ago
  You should try the outlook social connector and report back. but here are my answers: 1. OSC isn't compatible with google gadgets 2. OSC isn't very customizable for developers - the presentation layer is super limited 3. OSC requires a special install on Outlook 2003, 2007 - so for those users it will be a choice of one plugin: OSC or another Xobni 4. OSC doesn't improve Outlook search 5. OSC requires seperate installs if you want to get twitter, facebook, linkedin, salesforce, sharepoint, etc inside it. Xobni has that all with one install. 6. This is our business. OSC was a msft afterthought to respond to Xobni. Users that compare the two prefer Xobni (actually, good idea, i should run a formal study on this) Performance issues? I've heard some people complain about perf issues with OSC ;) but seriously, we've worked really hard on performance. Installed software is tough. And for most users, they have zero problems.
  - aditya 16y ago
    Thanks for the response, Matt! Unfortunately, it seems that documentation is really sparse for OSC and Xobni already seems to have solved quite a few of the challenges for Outlook. Suppose I'll try it for myself and see how it goes.

25 points by aston 16y ago

This announcement means that a developer can build a gadget for gmail using Google's APIs, and Xobni will fully support that Google API to bring the same gadget into Outlook. Build once and deploy to both gmail & Outlook More here: http://www.xobni.com/developer http://www.xobni.com/developer And feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to learn more

jpcx01 16y ago
All 600 million outlook users... bit of a stretch eh? Having a few million Xobni installs is pretty good, why not just advertise that?
- brezina 16y ago
  Yikes dude - you are all over this thread. the total addressable market of gmail is around 120M mailboxes. Building a gadget won't get you all of those users, you'll still need to convince them to add your gadget. Same thing goes for Outlook, yet it the market is bigger. There are 600M Outlook users, and over 5M xobni downloads, but you'll still have to convince users to add your gadget. Xobni will just make it super easy for you to take the gadget you made for gmail, and provide the same functionality to your Outlook users. Some of those users will be provided by Xobni. And some of those users will be introduced to Xobni & your gadget by the gadget developer. The point is this provides access to a huge market with very little effort.
  - jpcx01 16y ago
    Spent a few weeks building a gadget so I have a few opinions on the matter :-). The point of the post was to clarify that you guys are enabling people to plug into your plugin. So the addressable market is the few million people who are actively using Xobni. Not all 600 million outlook users. Now if you guys provided a redistributable that allowed me to package up my Gadget and ACTUALLY sell to all 600million outlook users, that would catch my attention. But one caveat is it would need to allow for the actual Xobni mining stuff (the memory/cpu hog) to be toggled on/off, but still allow for the contextual gadget to show up. I like what you guys are doing, and will probably participate. However, just had to let out a few gripes first ;-)
    - brezina 16y ago
      Awesome - We definitely make Xobni redistributable by partners. Email me matt at companyname. We'd love to help make this a success for you.

pazpaz 16y ago

one step closer to googol-sized acquisition. make it so brezina.

jpcx01 16y ago

Thats great, but the devil's in the details. Are you using the same Extractors API so it'll inspect the messages and provide matches?

brezina 16y ago
Yes. We support the exact same google Extractors API, so you'll have all the info you need to show relevant context to the message.
- jpcx01 16y ago
  Umm, not according to your docs. http://www.xobni.com/support/?view=192 http://www.xobni.com/support/?view=192 Recipient extractors are a tad bit important. No doubt its coming soon on your dev roadmap though.
  - brezina 16y ago
    We support the most important recipient extractor RecipientEmailExtractor - which gives you all recipients in both the to and cc field. We don't support RecipientToEmailExtractor and RecipientCCEmailExtractor right now, but we will with tonight's release.
    - jpcx01 16y ago
      Ah, cool. That'll work.

viksit 16y ago

Good stuff. Does this also clear up a path for a Xobni plus type gadget for use within Gmail (or google apps, more likely)? I'm guessing it could be monetized in the same fashion as the outlook tools are.

justlearning 16y ago

I tried Xobni (post yahoo acquiring) in a 'corporate setup' and found it to be a memory hog, The startup time is ridiculous with increasing mailbox size. I am better off searching outlook based on filters than using Xobni. And now adding more gadgets to outlook will just make it an obese guy in designer clothes. I wonder who uses Xobni? Any genuine Xobni users here?

jamesbkel 16y ago
Really? I haven't noticed it to be a resource hog and I find the search to be worlds better than Outlook, which some how manages to miss the obvious yet find the obscure every time I search. My mailbox is a pretty good size, but perhaps I haven't reached that threshold yet.
- nhebb 16y ago
  Outlook, which some how manages to miss the obvious I've noticed a quirk in Outlook 2007 that if I add an extra character to the search then hit backspace, it will find items it didn't find before.
adamsmith 16y ago
If you tried it right after we added Yahoo Mail support, that must have been 2008. We made a ton of performance improvements in early 2009. I talked about that process, and the fun of developing in Outlook, here: http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2009/04/investing-a-million-bucks-into-performance-and-stability.html http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2009/04/investing-a-million-bucks-i... folks on Outlook 2007 will also find a huge OL performance boost from upgrading to SP2, wherein the fixed about thirty Outlook perf bugs, some of which can be tickled by their addin API's!
RichardPrice 16y ago
I use Xobni a lot. The two things I find it very valuable for are: - seeing the Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter profiles of people who email me. Adding some social context to the emails that come into my inbox is really great. - easily finding someone's phone number. Xobni automatically extracts people's phone numbers from the emails in your inbox, so I often find that if I want to get someone's number, I'll search for their name in the Xobni pane in Outlook, and the person's number will be right there. I haven't found any performance issues at all. Outlook for me is just as fast as it is without Xobni.

iamelgringo 16y ago

I really like Xobni, guys. I'm seriously thinking of dropping Gmail for my day to day use, and using Outlook + Xobni. Gmail's contact management sucks after you pass 200 or so contacts. Your contact management is really really cool. If you guys built an Android app, I'd eagerly pay $15 bucks or so for it, and I'd happily make the complete transition from Gmail to Outlook + you guys. Just a thought.... Feel free to ping me if you are interested in talking to a motivated customer.

aditya 16y ago

How is this different from using the Outlook Social Connector (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c87e257c-d76f-4785-a09b-af36babd6e32&displaylang=en http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c87...) - and why would you want to use a layer in the middle (Xobni) other than for portability? Will there be performance issues?

brezina 16y ago
You should try the outlook social connector and report back. but here are my answers: 1. OSC isn't compatible with google gadgets 2. OSC isn't very customizable for developers - the presentation layer is super limited 3. OSC requires a special install on Outlook 2003, 2007 - so for those users it will be a choice of one plugin: OSC or another Xobni 4. OSC doesn't improve Outlook search 5. OSC requires seperate installs if you want to get twitter, facebook, linkedin, salesforce, sharepoint, etc inside it. Xobni has that all with one install. 6. This is our business. OSC was a msft afterthought to respond to Xobni. Users that compare the two prefer Xobni (actually, good idea, i should run a formal study on this) Performance issues? I've heard some people complain about perf issues with OSC ;) but seriously, we've worked really hard on performance. Installed software is tough. And for most users, they have zero problems.
- aditya 16y ago
  Thanks for the response, Matt! Unfortunately, it seems that documentation is really sparse for OSC and Xobni already seems to have solved quite a few of the challenges for Outlook. Suppose I'll try it for myself and see how it goes.