Today we have launched xobni.com/fan. This site will serve as a resource for Xobni fans to express their love for Xobni.

At xobni.com/fan you can invite friends to use Xobni and get a unique Xobni badge to put up on your blog or social network profile page. However, today’s addition is the Xobni store. Now you can get your very own Xobni t-shirt to wear around the office and show off to all of your colleagues and friends.

We are selling these t-shirts at cost, so don’t go mistaking some t-shirts sales for our web 2.0 business model.

Xobni is much cooler when your contacts have photos. Recently we added the ability for Xobni to import photos from the Outlook address contact book. But you can also add a photo directly to Xobni, which has a great image cropping tool. Here is how you do it:

1) Right click on grey holder image of a person’s contact card in Xobni
2) Select Edit Info
3) Click Change below the photo placeholder. You can choose a photo from your PC, or there is a cool trick to grab an image off the web. Here it is:

a) Use something like Google Image Search or Flickr to find a picture of the person on the web
b) Copy the location of the photo. You can do this by right-clicking on the photo in your browser and selecting “Copy Image Location”
c) Paste the image location in the File Name: field and click on the Open button.

Viola you are done. Xobni will grab the image off the internet and you can crop from there.

Kevin Tofel over at PC World posted a great review of Xobni today. See here.

Xobni has been featured in PC World several times both in print and online, but today they released their official PC World review of Xobni. These reviews have been known to make or break products and companies. Today’s review made Xobni.

Xobni received a score of 93/100 and a superior ranking. This is a higher score than any other software product I was able to find on PCWorld.com in 10 minutes of browsing. Very Exciting!

Some choice quotes from the article:

“This free application is a must-have for anyone who lives in Outlook”

“It provides functionality that Outlook should deliver natively, and does so without affecting the e-mail client’s performance.”

“Instead of treating mail conversations, contacts, and calendars as separate entities, Xobni weaves them together in a responsive, intuitive interface.”

That last quote is my favorite. That is EXACTLY what we like to hear!

It’s common for people to ask why a good engineer like myself would want to work in QA, especially when you have to fight the stigma’s of QA, namely:

1) You are in QA because you are not good enough for development

2) You are in QA as a stepping stone for development

3) You are in QA because you don’t like coding

My response to those statements: pish-posh. While these statements may apply to some people in the field, they certainly don’t apply to the people serious about QA. A good QA Engineer solves quality problems with an algorithmic intensity that rivals traditional programmers. They are a true hacker in the older sense of the word - they are here to find and exploit the problems in the system in any way possible.

Every problem has its boundaries. For most developers, the boundaries for implementing solutions are usually confined to one language, stack, or technology. The boundaries for problem solving in QA are generally much wider, simply because our solutions don’t have to be productized, exposed to the public, and aren’t necessarily even in the same language or stack.

This allows a much wider range of creative freedom when solving problems. Learning new languages and technologies becomes essential for your work. Having a large arsenal of tools to attack a problem becomes a necessary part of the job. This provides you with even more of a reason to learn about the latest and greatest in tech, which is something that appeals to all engineers alike.

At Xobni we approach QA differently than most. The people we look for are not here because they are not good enough for development. They are not here because they don’t like coding. The QA people here are expected to be at the top of their game. They are expected to build and create software that can topple the Jenga-like building blocks of our product. They are expected to be creative people who like to learn, explore, and exploit software.

That being said, Xobni is looking for a QA engineer! Check out the job post, and send resumes to ryan dot gerard at xobni.com if you think you can rock our world.

We call our QA team’s room the Pirate Lair (see above).

Etymology

Back in the spring of 2006 Adam was talking with Paul Graham, our first investor, about naming the email company Paul had just invested in. Adam was toying with the name “InboxAdvisor” mostly because he was consulting at a consumer Internet security company called SiteAdvisor at the time.

Paul suggested that Adam use the word “inbox” spelled backwards. Paul is known for this type of momentary genius. Adam went home, and registered the available (!!) five letter domain name www.xobni.com for $8.00. It is nearly impossible to find a five letter domain name these days, and yet we found one that actually had something to do with the company we were building.

Pronunciation

From the beginning we pronounced Xobni with a long ‘o’: Zobe-nee. Friends who have known Xobni since the beginning still pronounce the name with a long ‘o’. As the company began to get more exposure however, we found that everyone was pronouncing Xobni with a short ‘o’, including Bill Gates. Rather than fighting the tide, we now officially pronounce the name with a short ‘o’: Zob-nee , but it wasn’t until a few months ago that we removed the line over the ‘o’ in our logo, which was our early attempt at forcing the long ‘o’ pronunciation. Lesson: Don’t try to force user behavior or pronunciation.

Logo

There are a lot of fun things you can try with a company name that’s spelled backwards. I think a lot of early stage companies spend too much time worrying about names and logos. We did too. Below are the major milestones in the progression of our logo:

Okay, I’ll take the blame on this one. Yuck! I’ve never been called an artist. And this was the image on our first business card. I wonder what the VCs thought when we handed our cards across the board room table.

Finally, my Photoshop skills improved and I discovered my new favorite font: Trebuchet MS

We hired Bryan “rounded corners” Kennedy. Everything got nicer around here with Bryan on the team.

This is the logo we launched with at Techcrunch40

For public launch, Jeff insisted that we go lowercase and remove the line over the ‘o’. It was a good call, but my nostalgic side cried a little bit. We also tried a new method of highlighting the ‘backwards’ inbox.

But if you take a close look at our mascot, the Xobni man, you may notice a vestige of the days of old:

Misspellings

I wonder how many people visiting our website fail to realize xobni is the word “inbox” spelled backwards? We see misspellings of our company name in the media and in the Google searches that drive traffic to our site. Here are my favorite misspellings of X-O-B-N-I:

1. Xobini
2. Xobin
3. Xobnini
4. Xoboni
5. Xonbi
6. Xobani
7. Zobni
8. Zobny

Okay, I’ll admit it. I wanted to find a way to work the misspellings of “xobni” into a blog post. With our good pagerank this blog post should quickly move to the top of the Google search results for all xobni misspellings.

Today is an exciting day for everyone at Xobni. After seven months of invite-only beta, and over two years of product development, we’re proud to announce that Xobni is now publicly available for anyone to download. Xobni can be downloaded for free here.

The official press release for our launch can be found here.

Today’s New York Times is covering our successful beta program and the public launch of Xobni here.

It has taken a lot of hard work to get to this point. Our team has grown from two guys in an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts to a group of 14 dedicated team members in San Francisco that call Xobni home.

While the Xobni team has been working hard to make Xobni a success, our users also deserve a lot of credit. Your feedback has been essential in helping us to improve the performance and features of Xobni over the past seven months. We have responded to thousands of support and feedback emails from the over 50,000 individuals that have downloaded Xobni during our seven month closed beta period. We have had several dozen beta users visit us at the Xobni headquarters for user studies and another several dozen users have done remote performance and configuration tests with our engineers.

We will continue to work hard to improve the Xobni experience. Xobni has done a lot to improve our users’ email lives, but email and personal information still have a long way to go. Xobni and its users still have a long way to go, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

For Current Xobni Beta Users

If you are currently running Xobni it will automatically update to the latest version. If you need to re-download Xobni, you can download it instantly here.

Please let your friends and colleagues know that a better Outlook email experience awaits them at Xobni.com.

Thanks!

Email is so 1.0. But there are a few of us out there trying to show the inbox some new tricks. Making the inbox smarter and more powerful is the driving force behind Xobni. But we aren’t the only ones that are looking to the potential of email. So we thought would give a shout out to a new favorite at Xobni:

TripIt Just send your travel itinerary confirmation emails to plan@tripit.com and they magically become a living breathing travel plan for your trip. They combine your hotel, car rental, airline details into one smart itinerary. And because this is the internet, the information is now dynamic. It handles multiple members in your travel party seamlessly. Plus, now they have added a social element by showing where your friends are in the world, too. Wait until you see how simple it is to register, too. Perfect. If you travel, you should use TripIt!

We started shipping a new version of Xobni Insight to users today. We’ve made Xobni perform better, prettied up the details of the user interface, and removed the “Organize” tab. Yes, you read that correctly: we removed a section of Xobni’s functionality.

The Organize tab was born shortly before our September 2007 beta launch. We wanted to superset the functionality of Outlook 2007’s To-Do Bar, which also contains upcoming appointments and outstanding tasks.

We decided to focus exclusively on creating an awesome user experience with our core piece: Lightning fast search and a view on email that works the way your brain does – by people. We felt that the Organize features were a distraction from the core product. If only we had read our own blog entries: This post, “Do One Thing and Do It Well”, talks about how Lookout, a popular Outlook plugin that Microsoft acquired, had only one major piece of functionality and people loved it! Thus, instead of loading Xobni with more pieces of functionality, we decided to perfect the most important pieces.

The functionality we took out might make a reappearance, but in a different form. For now, we encourage you to enjoy the new speed and prettiness of your Xobni Insight.

You can check if you have this version by going to “Xobni > About”. It should say version “1.2.3 (build 3197)” or higher.

Xobni is proud to announce the beta release of Xobni for the Pine email client. This new release includes support for all major operating systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows running Cygwin.

Xobni beta for Pine exemplifies our commitment to bringing Xobni to platforms outside of Microsoft Outlook.

Click here to see the revamped Xobni homepage which will go live tomorrow.

Xobni for Pine will feature all of the same great features you’ve come to expect from Xobni for Outlook, including: ultra-fast search, conversation threading, and social network discovery. It also adds some new features that we’re sure you’ll find useful, like spacebar navigation, ASCII avatar rendering, 100K memory footprint, and a powerful keyboard command set (see man page).

We’re very excited about the future of the pine platform and look forward to developing and improving Xobni for Pine in years to come.

UPDATE: With April Fools’ come and gone, we must admit that this was made in commemorative jest. We hope you enjoyed our geeky humor!

Xobni would like to sincerely apologize to our users who
received duplicates of the same support message repeatedly between 3.25.08 and 3.26.08.  The situation was based upon an error
that occurred while upgrading our support ticketing software.

In fact, we were flooded with repeated identical tickets from our users as well and are still cleaning up the mess.

We do realize the enormous inconvenience this placed on many of you and we apologize again. We are so upset by this and other issues with the support system that we have decided to end our contract with them and try a new system.

It is possible that a few legitimate support requests were lost in the flood, so if Xobni’s support team has not responded to your request, this could be the reason. Please feel free to write again in the event that your ticket was lost.

We look forward to helping you with better success! Keep writing!