Xobni is an Outlook-plugin that displays a lot of information in an extra right hand column. It can display contact information (including, for example, one's Skype address), link to profiles on social networks, statistics of the communication with individual contacts (amount of emails to this person in the past day/week/month) and how this person scores compared to others, related contacts (based on ccs) and ongoing conversations. Xobni gets the contact information from the email signatures. If you want to look up someone and you type an 'a' then Xobni will immediately look up 'Adam', a person you have a lot of contact with. Tip: Boris Toet
Future Vision by Erwin Van Lun on this article
And this shows us how social coaching brands are slowly developing. Where first we made just a list of friends, now we’ll start to differentiate between friends, between contacts. Xobni helps us to analyse them. So that when we call ‘Call William’ in the car, it’s immediately clear which William you mean, even though you have five listed in Outlook. This kind of functionality will be taken over by all social network and communication tools.
Eventually we’ll choose one brand that watches all our contacts for us across all social networks. And which will help us maintain those relationships. Suggesting presents for a birthday is a simple example, helping is with organising a party for this specific person is a second, but eventually brands like Xobni will listen in on a conversation to make us (afterwards) aware of how we communicate. So that we can take it into account in future. We’re nowhere near that yet. After all, everything goes, you guessed it, step by step.