Turn Your Email Account into a Social Network

A typical office worker gets 126 non-spam messages per day and spends over a quarter of a day managing his inbox, according to a recent (free!) Wall Street Journal article. If you (out of necessity or compulsion) have to check your email box on demand, there are a few new products coming out that look like they might be pretty useful. One is called Xobni—”Inbox” backwards, get it?—which analyzes your Outlook inbox and allows you to see all sorts of relationships, like who emails you the most, how long certain people take to respond to emails, how relevant those emails are, etc. It also extracts phone numbers and other contact information from emails. In other words, it turns your lowly inbox into a social network, which Om Malik thinks could be a great productivity tool. It’s only in beta, but if you sign up now, you get first crack when it does open up.