David Adewumi

There’s been much a do about other YC-funded companies, but I’ll wager right now that Xobni has the biggest potential out of all YC companies-to-date. (Loopt could possibly have more, but since they’re in stealth I haven’t seen anything. Edit: They’re not in stealth mode, although currently support is limited for their service)

I think most people underestimate the power of Xobni because they don’t use Microsoft Outlook, and so assume the technology is not really relevant (despite the 300 million + users).

I strongly disagree.

Everyone’s looking for the next Google, and I think Xobni is one of the only companies out there that has created a technical backend strong enough to be the “next Google.”

What Google did to search on the internet, I believe Xobni will do to social search. But not just from one entry point, say “www.xobni.com” where a user would search for information on a particular person. Rather, its potential is social search within the context of every single online network the user has.

After having snagged Yahoo’s former VP of Social Search, the plan is clear — Xobni will become Google for your personal information.

Problem 1. Has anyone reading this been able to search Facebook for comments, wall posts, or message threads using Facebook’s tools? (If you don’t use Facebook, insert Myspace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Orkut, social-network-of-choice instead)

Didn’t think so.

By extending Xobni into social networks such as Facebook, and the slew of micro-social networks, as well as Gmail and Yahoo mail, Xobni will create a super search tool of personal information.

Problem 2. A ubiquitous contact database. The potentials for revenue are almost endless really. CRM-like technology based on the users profile. One problem has always been transporting contacts (and more importantly detailed information on those contacts) wherever a user goes — web, mobile, desktop, wherever. On this note I feel that Plaxo is the biggest competitor to Xobni, although i’d have to think that it’s propietary technology is not as powerful.

I know. For Lomic, a natural gas software company where I help run things, I just transferred more than 2000 contacts from a year 2000 version of ACT — a desktop-based CRM — to Salesforce. What unfortunately wasn’t transferred, was ACT notes, as well as key email messages and important data such as serial numbers, key numbers, maintenance renewal information, and the like.

Every day users may not be thinking about this, but I guarantee every single enterprise is. The search for information has been the hot thing for years, but it is the search for information within your “social graph” (i.e. customers for enterprises) that will really blow the door open.

Problem 3. The so-called “semantic web”

I don’t know what the general consensus is (or if there is one), but I think “Web 3.0″ or the “semantic web” is already here, slowly creeping up on us. I don’t imagine it as some magic wave where you can magically find anything and everything you want with the click of an “easy button.”

Rather, the semantic web are services like Xobni, where you’ll have a browser toolbar, or a stand-alone application where you simply search “Matt Brezina” and all the information you need will be filtered in– conversations, attachments, chat, phone capability, — but from a wide variety of applications, from Facebook to SalesForce to Gmail and Outlook and even Flickr. Hopefully your mobile phone soon. (Ever had to manually input 500 names and numbers into a new phone?)

Look at Perceptive Pixel, or even the Nintendo Wii and try and say the “semantic web” is not already here.

More important than simply finding the contact is finding all the information related to the contact. (Again, very important for enterprises, and no, Salesforce does not cut it.)

See the example below Matt gives about looking for a conversation you may remember of a friend who mentioned a ski resort in Vermont.

Problem 4. It takes serious leadership to be the next Google.

The players: Adam Smith, MIT grad student; Matt Brezina, PSU alum and Maryland Grad student; teamed with Gabor Cselle, who apparently did graduate research on inbox organization and worked for Google, seem to be a pretty formidable team.

Combine that with the newly-hired Jeff Bonforte as CEO, and Xobni has a pretty solid managerial team.

If you don’t know what Xobni does, below is an excerpt from an upcoming article I’m writing on Xobni.

Xobni’s goal is to not only revolutionize its users inboxes, but also organize personal information, Brezina said.

“Our goal is to organize information around relationships. We want to be the Google of personal information,” he said.

His company’s first product, Xobni Insight, is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that extracts information from the emails stored in Outlook. With the information, Xobni’s toolbar automatically creates profiles of each email user, displaying a person’s relationship, attachments sent, a history of emails sent between the two parties, as well as a time graph showing at what time of day the most quantity of emails was sent.

While Xobni is focused for now on email organization for Outlook, it wants to be able to aggregate information from different webmail clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, and others. Brezina said it also wants to bring in instant messaging, and aggregate information from social networks.

Brezina gave the example of a friend who remembers a story another friend related about a ski resort in Vermont. A user will be able to search Xobni’s database for “Stow,” the name of the ski resort, and instantly find all the related threads , conversations, and media traded with friends.

I’ll let start-up social network YouNoodle predict companies’ future successes — but with Xobni, I predict we’ll see big things from them.