Spell “inbox” backwards and you get “xobni”. It is a creative name for a company that develops an increasingly useful Microsoft Outlook plugin. Xobni indexes all the e-mail stored locally within Outlook and remotely in Exchange servers. It then makes connections between recipients and social portals like Facebook and Linkedin.
Lets say John Doe is one of your contacts. You will be able to view John’s Facebook profile picture and additional public information by simply highlighting an e-mail received from him. You will also get a listing of past conversations. Even more useful are the statistics generated by Xobni. Useful information like when is John more likely to be at his computer and respond to you e-mail is also available. Other features include improvements in finding attachments and enhanced searching capabilities. A free version is available of Xobni and another with additional features for $29.95. It is compatible with most versions of Outlook. Unfortunately, it is not currently available for the new version of Outlook 2011 for MacOS.