Xobni Review

Posted by Tom Blue on March 17, 2009 under Companies, Technology | Be the First to Comment

I downloaded Xobni quite awhile ago, but I just thought about them again recently so I figured I would give their plug-in a review.  Xobni has an Outlook plugin that allows you to view statistics and data about the other person that you are emailing.  For example, if you were to email me, I could view any public information about you that is in LinkedIn, Facebook, & Hoover’s.

The Good:  See above.  It is great to be able to fairly quickly see someone’s information when their email comes in. This really helps sales people because you can find out how large their company is(revenues), and a direct link to their LinkedIn page so you can find out more about that specific person.  This is very helpful in sales.  Personally, I could care less about someone’s facebook page.  I am not going to befriend an acquaintenance, but maybe some disagree.  Another thing I like about it is seeing the recent history section of the plugin.  You can see what recent emails you have had with this person.  This makes it much easier than doing a search in Outlook.

The OK:   Although the above features are nice, it takes a little while to load, and I don’t like how much room it takes up inside of Outlook.  My Outlook seems crowded enough as it is, I am not sure how long I can keep this thing up.  This was the sole reason why I hid the plugin after I first downloaded it. It just took up too much space.

The Bad: Sometimes Clunky.  They have a piece called Xobni Analytics which is interesting if you want to see who you have been emailing.  This isn’t very interesting to me, but maybe to people that are in Support or something.  The problem was that Outlook froze for about 40 seconds when I loaded this feature.  In addition, I have gotten some Outlook errors after I loaded Xobni that I never got before.  They went away after awhile but after first downloading I did get a couple of errors.  Given that my Outlook is already finicky as it is, I am hesitant on having something on top of it…