A few weeks back I wrote about trying out the LinkedIn Add-in and time has reinforced for me that it's not something I'll use often, whether due to my habits or it's design. About the same time I also loaded the Xobni add-in. Overall it comes across as much more polished and fits nicely into the Outlook UI. When you first install it Xobni spends a few minutes (or more) indexing your Outlook data and you can see the search box at the top of the form - very very fast search. The MS search you can install is also fast, but I'd give this the edge by a small margin and very easy to use, just type and instant results. Interesting if not compelling.

The screen shot below is marked up some for privacy, but you can get a feel for what it displays (and this can collapse down to a slender vertical bar). Contact information at the top is pulled from LinkedIn, Facebook, and native Outlook data. There is a little chart icon at the bottom of that box and if you click it, you get an interesting bit of data intelligence - how often and at what time of day you exchange email (see "Emails from Steve by hour" below.

Below that is information about their network, again pulled from the sources above including everyone that was included on an email to or from them, which is an interesting way to discover associations. Below that is conversations which is a summary of all recent email, and below that a list of files exchanged.

You get to see all of that instantly when you click on an email in your inbox. All of the little boxes can be expanded for more detail, and if you click a contact, it then changes to show that contact info. They also provide some interesting if not hugely useful statistics related to email; # sent, frequency by domain/sender, etc. One nice marketing touch is the ability to generate "fun facts" to send to those you frequently touch. During the install it suggests a few and you can go back and ask for more later (note that this is the one area where it takes a few seconds to compile the answer).

I can't say enough it's very fast and hasn't changed Outlook performance at all that I can see on a 1GB+ PST. For now it stays loaded because it does come in handy at times. I'd like to see a deeper integration with LinkedIn - especially the ability to generate a list of people that I correspond with and that aren't in my network and to show more of the information from their LI profile.