One word - Xobni … just don’t ask me to pronounce it.
I have never been a big fan of Outlook or any of the incarnations of Microsoft’s free email clients. With Outlook the reasons are twofold - first it is a huge program with things like To Do lists, Calendaring which I realize are things that make it valuable to a hellva lot of people but I just want email. Second is its data storage and backup methodology. Everything in Outlook is stored in one *.PST file that over time can grow to a very large size and has been known to cause problems. As for a built-in backup and restore … well there is none which means you have to run a third party utility to protect your data.
That all said when I heard about Xobni I must admit I almost wanted to install Outlook just to be able to try it out even though I couldn’t because they are in limited invite only beta which I don’t have. Even so just by the demo screencast on their site I could see that this could be the one Outlook add-in application that could get me to forego my concerns about Outlook and start using it again.
While email has largely taken second place in this world of Web 2.0 social network communications it is still a primary connector for millions of people but trying to make sense of all of the varied information that comes this way can be quite daunting. With Xobni; at least from what I can see on the site you can begin to regain some control over all that information - past and present.
I have a request in for a beta invite and if I should actually get one I guess I’ll be back in the world of Outlook - if only they had a built-in backup and restore feature for Outlook that for me would be probably the clincher. In the meantime if you live in Outlook drop by their site and see what email sanity could be like.
UPDATE: apparently this post got the attention of the folks at Xobni and they were good enough to send me an invite for which I thank them. So look for a further post on Xobni after I’ve had a chance to play with it.
Listening to: Delerium - Morpheus - Gaza
3 Comments
Hi Steven,
This is Bryan of Xobni.
Thanks for spreading the word about Xobni Insight - we too are very excited about its potential for making Outlook all the more valuable to our users. I look forward to hearing how your experience goes.
Bryan
thanks for dropping by and yes I am looking very forward to playing with as soon as support can figure out why I’m still having the “disappearing” problem with Xobni not wanting to load.
then when I’ve had some serious time working with it I will indeed be writing something up for a post.
I am anxious to see it working myself. It sounds more convenient though. Thanks for Xobni. I look forward to reading more of you postings. You may actually check out the following site if you are interested with business leads:
http://www.kingsbridgelists.com/leads/business.html