Do you think Bill Gates is a visionary man? I do.

Bill Gates, speaking February 2008 at the Microsoft Office Developer Conference in San Jose, California, called Xobni "the next generation of social networking." So, what is Xobni? The application, called Xobni (name is strange, but if you spell inbox backwards, you will get what they mean), is an Outlook plug-in that not only indexes your inbox for advanced searching but also turns Outlook into a kind of social networking utility that can identify links between e-mail recipients.

Xobni digs into e-mails in Outlook and creates some kind of database, pulling key pieces of information out of messages in the folders, such as names, phone numbers, and addresses and organizes them into additional sidebar, bringing valuable collective information at your service. For example, click on one of the e-mails and the Xobni sidebar opens an information-rich profile for your contact. You will see conversation statistics (such as how often you communicate with this person and when), phone numbers, other people in the contact’s network (those who have been cc’d on earlier messages), previous and current e-mail threads, appointments, and a list of all attachments that person has sent you.

At the moment, the plug-in is available exclusively for Outlook, but more e-mail platforms’s solutions on its way. From beginning of May, company entered into a Beta stage, when anybody can download and use the utility for free, and no invitation needed.

I personally did it, and I am really excited so far by the extended mail client capabilities. Highly recommended!

More information and link for downloading: http://www.xobni.com/

Additional Reading:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/117050

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/technology/05xobni.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006890.html