Xobni Gadgets
Last year Hotmail introduced what it calls 'dynamic' email tools; if you get a message with links to photos, videos, office documents, parcel delivery status or a few other useful things, you see them live in your email — thumbnails of the images instead of links to online photo sites, a player for video links, whether your parcel has been delivered already. Xobni's new gadgets bring something similar to Outlook — but for rather more services — based on OpenSocial.
You can pick and choose the gadgets you want to install; most are free (and the ones you have to pay for have 30-day trials so you can check them out).
You install gadgets from the Xobni web site (there's a link on the Xobni sidebar). You have to restart Outlook to see new gadgets (the gadgets that are preinstalled can confuse you by showing up in the Xobni sidebar inside Outlook without a restart), and you can turn them off from a small control panel.
The obvious gadgets are for social networks. Outlook doesn't have a field in the address book for Twitter handles (and there isn't an Outlook Social Connector for Twitter), so when you click on an email the Xobni Twitter gadget lets you type in the Twitter name to use for the sender — but it also searches for Twitter profiles that might be the same person (and it's right fairly often). The Klout gadget does a similar search once you've authorised it to use Twitter, but it's a slightly different process (the gadgets aren't all created by Xobni so the user experience for similar actions varies from gadget to gadget). You have to log into Facebook and pick Facebook profiles as well, and the amount of information you see about Facebook friends varies from a note telling you you're friends with someone to a list of all their recent updates.
It might be useful to be reminded of what someone has been saying or doing when you read their email, but more useful gadgets also let you do things. The Dropbox gadget shows you what folders you're sharing with the person who wrote the message you have selected, and you can click to download files or browse for a file to upload and share with them. Link Xobni to Evernote and you can associate notes with specific people, so you can jot down details after a call or copy them from an email so they're handy when you come back to the conversation. Outlook's long-lost journalling feature was rather more complicated, and linked notes in OneNote don't show up as neatly as this; if you find you want to annotate your email without stranding the information inside your inbox this is quite a neat way of doing it. There are gadgets for yammer, Huddle, Webex, Salesforce, XING and other services that give you similar handy ways to see useful information about the person you're exchanging email with. Having the gadgets there reminds you can you can get a little more context for what you're doing.
Some gadgets put the information at the bottom of the email message, where you can see it quickly. The Flickr gadget shows thumbnails of images that are only links in a message; this is just as useful as it is on Hotmail, letting you glance at baby photos or decide whether you want to look through holiday snaps in detail without ever leaving the message. The Yelp gadget isn't nearly as useful because it only retrieves the phone number and rating for the Yelp link in a message, not the address or map — and before we agree on a restaurant we need to know where it is as well as how good it is. Not all messages with YouTube links in showed the YouTube gadget but it's useful when it does load; you get a thumbnail and when you click the gadget bar resizes and plays the video right in your email — again, that's less disruptive than clicking through to open the YouTube site.
Gadgets can only retrieve information when you're online, of course; but they don't cache the information, so even if you've looked at a message and the Flickr gadget has retrieved the image thumbnails of the links you won't see them if you look back at the mail when you're not connected. You wouldn't want this kind of caching filling up your hard drive, but it would be nice to get the option of caching some of the details for messages you've already opened. If you're offline when you open an email and you go online to let the gadget retrieve information, we found you often have to close and then reopen the message to have that load.
The Google Translate gadget is useful but intrusive; it appears on every email message, although you probably only want to translate a fraction of your messages. It auto-detects language well and the translations are the usual Google level (useful for understanding but not to be relied upon for anything business critical). Only the first few lines of the email are translated though, which makes it less useful.
The drawback with Xobni is that it's a second search system inside Outlook, and if you're using Outlook 2010 the search is already pretty good — running a second indexing system can end up reducing your performance. Plus it's an extra pane in an already crowded interface. On its own Xobni certainly does more than the Outlook Social Connector that puts contact pictures, social status updates and the files you've exchanged by email in a pane at the bottom of each message, but perhaps not enough more to justify it unless you need the extra analytics (like who you mail the most and how long it tends to take them to respond). There are fewer features in Xobni for Gmail (still in invitation-only beta) but they're perhaps more useful there — and if you also use BlackBerry (Android and iPhone apps are on the way), sharing information about contacts between devices is very useful; When Xobni adds gadgets to Gmail they're going to be even more useful there.
Gadgets makes Xobni more appealing. You probably wouldn't want the overhead of the whole Xobni tool just to get the mail gadgets in Outlook, but they are enormously useful — and you can now pick and choose which of the Xobni features you see presented in the sidebar in the same way you pick and choose gadgets. Your inbox is where you organise most of your information and activities; Xobni Gadgets makes that even easier.
Mary Branscombe