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XOBNI: Rather Cool, but Strangely Scary PDF Print E-mail
Clive 'Max' Maxfield
Clive 'Max' Maxfield
Are you drowning in email? For some folks like my mother email really isn't a problem. Her spam filter removes most of the dross, and she typically receives only one or two emails a day from her friends and family. At the other end of the spectrum you have "power users" like yours truly... You wouldn't believe how many emails I have to wade through each day. In addition to all of my clients as a freelance writer, I also act as editor for several electronic publication websites (like the iDESIGN portion of ChipDesignMag.com) and I write numerous blogs and articles for print magazines and online sites (likei www.PCBdesign007.com ). Meanwhile, in my spare time... (Ha!)

The point is that I have multiple email accounts (six active ones that I can think of off-the-top-of-my-head) and I receive mountains of emails from around the world on a daily basis.

Now, I use Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, which is incredibly powerful. It does things like automatically connect to my ISP servers and gather all of my messages from my various accounts and reply to them from the appropriate account (which is one reason I no longer recall exactly how many accounts I actually have).

Outlook also lets me organize messages into different folders and has all sorts of ways to search and present data... and yet... and yet... even with all of these capabilities, messages still go missing, or they "hide" in a folder I wasn't expecting, or something else that I can’t think of at the moment.

Which brings us to the point of this blog, which is a free tool called XOBNI that you can download from XOBNI (don’t ask me to pronounce it ... the best I can come up with is "zob-knee") is rather clever... and just a little scary. Let me elucidate (don’t worry, I'm a professional, it won’t hurt at all, but don’t try this at home)...

This little scamp installs itself as a sub-window/dialog in your main Outlook window. It indexes all of your email messages and heuristically "data-mines" all sorts of relationships between the various items – who sent them, when they were sent, who was copied, and so forth.

Let's first consider some of the things that are cool about this. As one example, XOBNI gathers related emails into "Conversations". This allows you to quickly locate a dialog you've been having with someone and to see all of the messages that have passed back and forth on this topic presented in chronological order.

XOBNI also presents you with a list of names of all of the people with whom you have communicated. The way this is implemented goes way beyond the capabilities in Outlook. Let's suppose, for example, that you receive an email from "Joe Smith" but you don’t have his contact details in your address book. Let's further assume that you have a LinkedIn account (or a Facebook account). In this case, you select Joe's name, then you click on the LinkedIn (or Facebook) icon in XOBNI. Assuming Joe also has a LinkedIn (or Facebook) account, all of his contact details will be immediately populated from his profile on LinkedIn (or Facebook).

Similarly, if you have a Hoovers account. You can select Joe's name, click the Hoovers' icon in XOBNI, and immediately see details about the company Joe works for (number of employees, annual turnover...).

You can also track down all sorts of useful information about yourself, such as the average amount of time it takes you to respond to folks who email you and suchlike.

All well-and-good, but what about the "scary" part? Well, suppose you and I exchange emails with each other on a regular basis. With the click of an icon I can see the history of your responses. Maybe you respond faster in the morning than in the afternoon. If you respond the fastest at around 10:00 a.m., maybe this would be a good time for me to call you on the phone if I'm so-inclined. If there's a daily dip in your responses between say noon and 1:00 p.m., perhaps that's when you take your lunch. But what's this I see? There's a 30 minute lag in your responses around 3:00 p.m. ... and I see the same thing occurring with one of your colleagues with whom I also correspond. Am I to draw any conclusions from this nugget of data?

Or how about this... let's suppose I want to see with whom you correspond with the most. When I receive an email from you, whichever email application I'm using I can also see the names of the folks you copied (not the ones you "blind copied" of course). So I could keep track of this by hand on a message-by-message basis and gradually build up a picture as to your communication habits... but who would take the time to do this sort of thing?

The point is that XOBNI does this for me .. by selecting your name, I can immediately get a list of all of the folks that you've copied on any messages you've sent to me, and how many times they were copied, and... well, all sorts of other data.

As I say, on the one hand this is all both cool and interesting. It reminds me of various scenarios from science fiction stories that seemed "far future" when they were penned just a few years ag,o but which are now coming to pass on a daily basis. On the other hand, it's sort of scary to see how much information can be "data mined" about you without your knowing it... this has certainly given me food for thought!
 
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