Holy Freakin' Wow is just about all I can say about this little plug-in for Outlook that I just read about in the last issue of Wired. I downloaded and installed the 3M file and it took just a little over 20 minutes for it to index my entire multi-gig PST (all three of 'em). What does it do? It turns the otherwise atomic messages that lie in your mailbox and creates "conversations" and other linkages between them.

The result is that you begin to see the threads between yourself and the others you communicate with on a regular basis. If you're like me in that you rely almost exclusively on email as your primary form of communication with others, you'll quickly see the value in understanding this.

Let me show you what it does by way of example. Once the indexing is complete, Xobni (which is the word "Inbox" backwards, if you're wondering about the odd name) will show you how you are communicating over the long-haul with others. Check out the image above, which is a screen shot from the panel it creates in Outlook. There you'll see some info about my communications with Dave Knight over at Realtime.

Xobni interfaces with LinkedIn to show me with what people Dave and I are interlinked (assuming both people are users of LinkedIn). It even pulls Dave's picture from his LinkedIn account if its stored there. Also present is an understanding of what times of day I can typically expect to receive mail from Dave. Rather than searching through old stored mail folders, Xobni shows me the threaded conversations I've had recently between myself and Dave. This means I can get through my mail faster, which means I can get the "real" work done faster.

If you've ever found yourself diving through old mail to find attachments sent by a person, Xobni also gives you a list of every attachment you've got in your PST from this person. Nice for finding those documents you've otherwise lost.

Xobni adds a link to the menu bar of Outlook that enables a few analytics charts you can pull that documents the times of day when you get the most mail, how long you're taking to respond to people on a month-by-month basis, how many unique contacts you're receiving over periods of time, and other metadata analyses. The image below shows my own personal mail traffic metadata, telling me that my mail deluge really doesn't start until about 9:30a. I typically spike my return messages much later in the evenings at 5p and again at 9p while others get theirs to me earlier in the morning.

Xobni is free for now, but will soon release a for-cost version that includes additional features and analytics. You can see more about the tool or download your own copy at http://www.xobni.com.