As many of you saw (we know because usage has been crazy!), we recently announced a deal with LinkedIn where you can seamlessly receive important information and photos of your contacts directly into your Xobni sidebar. Our mission is to help our users get the information they need right into the inbox.

Today, we’ve expanded on that effort. We’ve been working with Facebook and are announcing today that we are among the first participants in Facebook Connect, which brings Facebook profile information right into the Xobni sidebar. Once implemented, Xobni will be leveraging Facebook’s massive global user base and development platform to automatically show your contacts’ Facebook profile pictures, status, recent photos, mutual friends, location and online presence inside Xobni. Now that is a handy use of your social graph!

This integration speaks to the ever-increasing importance of social networking data and Facebook’s prominence in the space with over 70 million users around the world. The Xobni sidebar in Outlook will display public data from Facebook profiles and will also offer the user an option to sign into their Facebook account through Xobni and view private data like photos and status messages for their Facebook friends. By leveraging the profiles of Facebook users, Xobni provides greater context around emails by seamlessly informing you of what else is going on in your contacts’ lives.

Facebook has become a killer social app for tens of millions of people, serving as a new kind of address book for keeping track of contacts. A recent Washington Post article on the future of address books spoke about Facebook, LinkedIn, and the value of the data trapped in social networks. The article also spoke about how Xobni is advancing the address book for email: “The best you can get is a free plug-in for Outlook called Xobni.” We believe that combining data from social networks like Facebook with Xobni will make us all better at personal and professional relationship management.

We’ll be sure to announce here on our blog, to our mailing list, and in our forums when Xobni with Facebook integration is available. To signup for this and future announcements, please do so on our download page (look for the “Keep in Touch” box where you can type in your email).

Becky Buckman at the WSJ wrote an article for today’s paper titled “Email’s Friendly Fire” I was fortunate to get to speak with Becky on several occasions as well as provide her with an interview for today’s story.

Xobni was mentioned in the article which appears on the front page of the Marketplace section. The article discusses the increasing amount of email received in the corporate workplace and products to overcome the resulting email overload. Xobni was featured as one of these products.

“These people are in pain,” says Matt Brezina, the 26-year-old co-founder of Xobni, which has received $4.2 million in funding from venture capitalists. Xobni’s product places a set of features on top of a customer’s email inbox, such as “profiles” of online contacts complete with photos, and quick links to set up appointments. The nine-person company says it has about 1,000 people globally testing the product — including salespeople, recruiters and marketing managers who use email frequently — and expects to release it broadly early next year.

We designed Xobni Insight to give our users context surrounding email conversations and relationships so that they can make better decisions faster. With lightening fast search, threaded conversations, and quick attachment discovery Xobni makes the task of working through 200 daily emails a lot less painful.