xobni - linkedin integration

I have been using Xobni for a while now - it integrates with Outlook and shows you your social network based on your emails. As per my post previously on Xobni, it isn’t the complete tool yet - I feel for it to stay as a long term addition to Outlook it really needs to add more productivity benefits which still aren’t there.

But it has added integration with LinkedIn now which means I can get info from LinkedIn on people I email and I can remove my LinkedIn addon for Outlook That is no detriment to LinkedIn really as Xobni still diverts me to LinkedIn’s website.

Overall though whilst its a nice addition, it isnt giving me much in the way of overall productivity gains. It does look nice and I get to know who I have sent over 2000 emails to..

Popularity: 9% [?]

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It’s more than a year since I gave a talk on Attention based management systems and how I envisaged they would become key to managing all the data that is thrown at us everyday. If anything attention as a buzzword has decreased in the past 12 months, whilst the amount of data has increased massively thanks in no small part to Twitter and the Facebook newsfeed.

It would be interesting to see whether a prolific rss reader like Scoble saw a decrease in the number of posts he read compared to last year. Back in September, the BBC reported that the time required to use Facebook has come about at the expense of worker productivity.

So why are attention tools not getting attention? (sorry!) It is actually rather simple. It’s built into everything we use already.

The very Facebook newsfeed that has increased the amount of data we see, is customisable to show what we want to see. Facebook rolled out the ability to give feedback on what you do and do not want to see (I trust it will be used eventually as it doesnt seem to be yet!). It is early days but this very newsfeed allows you to keep in touch with more people using less time.

The major reason more people have been using Google Reader is the flexibility it gives you to read blog posts efficiently. I definitely read more posts now then I used to with Bloglines a year ago. Fav.or.it is another RSS reader that attempts to place content most relevant to you in front of you.

Even the workhorse of the office worker, Microsoft Outlook 2007 has taken a huge step with its task features. It now places tasks both in a new right hand panel so you can see it immediately as well as the relevant tasks in your calendar. I used tasks sporadically before but could not do without it now.

As for the applications I looked at a year ago, Touchstone (now Particls) and Attensa still exist and I’ll take a closer look at both in later posts.

Oh and one last thing - just like in marketing, attention is all about relevance.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Microsoft have released a plugin to sync both your contacts and email between Windows Live Mail and Outlook instead of/as well as using the web interface. This used to be paid for but is now free (you still have to pay if you want to sync calendars as well..). For those who find the web interface of Windows Live slowwwwww, this is great Maybe I’ll switch back from gmail now..

download it here

Popularity: 28% [?]

It’s commonly accepted now that for RSS to be truly successful it needs to lose its techy feel and be easier to use - so its good to see that at least a small step has been taken by the Outlook 2007 team by helping to share feeds without having to go into the menus and copy and paste obscure urls that mean nothing to the average user.

Of course the URLs are still there and visible to the user - but its a small step

Can other 3rd party applications interact with this functionality I wonder?

(Side thought: I thought the array of menus has disappeared in Office 2007 - but note the method for accessing the feeds.. tools>accounts>rss>subscription options - looks like there is still some menus about and some depth to them as well!)

Popularity: 9% [?]