Xobni is a plugin for Outlook that adds advanced search and social functions to the email client. When we last looked at Xobni, the service indexed your email messages and created personal profiles for each of your contacts by automatically extracing phone numbers and loking users up on LinkedIn. Now Xobni has rolled out an update that adds integration with Skype, Facebook, Hoovers, and Yahoo! Mail.

Here's how it works. You can search for email using the Xobni sidebar. When you click on a message, Xobni will pull up information about the sender, including information from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Hoovers. If your contact's Skype profile or phone number are available, you can also initiate a call with the click of a button.

In addition to searching your Outlook mail, you can also have Xobni index your Yahoo! Mail, although in order to reply to messages you'll need to login to the Yahoo! Mail web interface.

There's a new version of the free Windows chat/social messaging client Digsby today. Probably the biggest change in this release is a dramatic reduction in memory use. Like a 75% reduction.

One of the biggest complaints early Digsby users had was that the application was a memory hog. And while it still certainly uses a bit more memory than some IM clients, that's to be expected since Digsby isn't just an IM client. The program also provides email notifications and updates from social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

The latest release also adds LinkedIn support. Once you register your LinkedIn account you'll be able to see the number of unattended alerts at a glance by looking at the icon in your system tray. You can also click on the icon to see the latest updates from your LinkedIn contacts.

There have also been some performance updates that should make the program more responsive. And each IM protocol will try several connection methods for getting around firewalls and proxy servers before giving up.

If you've been avoiding Digsby because of its high memory footprint, it might be time to give it another look. In my tests, I've found that it uses between 25MB and 40MB of memory. Now if only the Digsby team would hurry up and release Mac and Linux versions they've been promising.

As the 2008 US presidential election campaign finally approaches full steam, presumtive nominees Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama are facing off in the media to win hearts and minds. But which candidate is making the most of the of online social media services?

A visit to www.barackobama.com shows that the Obama campaign has established itself firmly in the social media world with an offical presence on major services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn and more specialist sites such as Glee, Eons, MyBatanga, AsianAve and Faithbase.

On the Republican side, John McCain's presidential campaign has developed its basic Web presence with a mult-faceted Web site but McCain lags far behind Obama in terms of presence and supporters in the key online social media battlegrounds.

There is a bit of a missing link between having someone's phone number and having their URLs. Not everyone has an iPhone, so it's not always easy to send a hyperlink that won't have to be retyped into a browser later. RmbrMe is a clever concept, but it makes us wish for something even easier. Instead of going to a browser and typing in a five-digit code to get to a profile that aggregates all of your other profiles, it would be nice to see a service that generated friend requests straight from the text message.

For now, rmbrMe is a fairly elegant solution to the problem of helping people, well, remember you. The catch, and the reason we probably won't become frequent users of the service, is that it charges 49 cents a message, on top of whatever your carrier charges. Asking for an e-mail address might be a little bit dorkier, but it's also cheaper.

LinkedIn, the professional networking site, has released new features, including a homepage redesign and developer platform. Sure this is going to be a little more useful to business users, but does LinkedIn need to expand and focus outside the business sector to make things stickier?

LinkedIn's new focus seems like an effort to emulate what Facebook has had with outside web applications. The new LinkedIn beta homepage provides customizable modules that display network updates in a dashboard format. This allows users to potentially be more productive by showing what contacts are up to, what news is most important to colleagues and questions and answers from your specific industry with the use of familiar feeds. But why stop there?

People that do business together and are connected via outside interests could possibly do a lot more on the site if more personal based modules were available. However, this is just the beginning of a component that is part of Google's OpenSocial developer platform so we will have to wait and see what becomes of it.

Nonetheless it's great to see that LinkedIn is growing...mind you slowly, and cautiously building upon their platform. Will it manage to pull back business users that slipped away to Facebook for more personal networking with these developments? Could it possibly ever attract younger users?

Microsoft became the market leader in operating system deployment largely by making its OS and software available to any hardware maker that wanted to license the technology. Apple, on the other hand, has always insisted the its OS should only run on Apple-labeled computers. So while Microsoft is often slammed for not being "open," the company owes much of what it is to early openness.

And it looks like Microsoft arch rival Google may be playing the same card when it comes to social networking. The company's OpenSocial social networking platform allows third party companies to partner with Google. While Facebook opened up its API earlier this year, allowing third parties to create applications, Google has attracted some major players, including MySpace, Six Apart, and Bebo, LinkedIn, Ning, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5. That's sort of the equivalent of getting IBM and HP on your side.

But here's what makes OpenSocial different. You'll notice that some of the big names in there are other social networks. That's because OpenSocial is a platform, not a website. MySpace, Friendster, and other social networks partnering with Google will use OpenSocial APIs, meaning if you develop an application for one site it will function on all the other sites.

In other words, OpenSocial isn't a social networking site. It's a common set of APIs that will be used by social networking sites -- and Google is behind the initiative, which gives them the same kind of status here that Microsoft had in the early days of desktop operating systems. You know, if you think desktop OSes and social networks are comparable, which they're probably not.

LinkedIn is planning to let users add profile images starting today. This is something that has been a long time coming, and is pretty much the standard for social networks of all kinds.

Other social networks are way ahead of the game, but LinkedIn is trying its best to stay on track and give its users what they want. The addition of images in personal profile pages might not be that important for the business community that LinkedIn attracts, but as LinkedIn's Adam Nash suggests, you may recognize the faces of people you once worked with without remembering their names. Will this be enough to pick up what they might have lost to Facebook?

With the Facebook competition heating up big-time, LinkedIn has started a fire under its development plans opening up an API and improving its Groups. LinkedIn has reported that 250,000 new users join each week.

Social networks are huge, and Yahoo knows this, that's why they have been working hard to develop the next level of social networks, KickStart.

Yahoo! KickStart is aimed at matching college students with relevant employers. This new service will give users a profile page where they can post a resume similar in style to LinkedIn. The companies listed in the service can then start up groups which users can join, start a discussion and hopefully get hired.

The service is still in a concept only phase, and might never make it to launch. Sounds like it could defiantly be a good way for students to enter the job market, we hope something comes out of this study.

Is LinkedIn starting to feel more heat from Facebook? The San Francisco-based company is looking for an on-site Developer Network Manager to act as an intermediary between the company and API developers. The ad (registration required) says they're looking for someone with a combination of marketing, technical, and communication skills and also outlines pretty clearly that the job entails a lot of API program evangelism. They even go so far as to say that whomever they hire should be prepared to build a "LinkedIn Developer Network from the ground up.

Could this be further indication that LinkedIn realizes it needs to take a hard look at what Facebook is offering and at least make a run at matching what they have to offer if they want to stay competitive in the social network market?

There's no doubt that Facebook is the 'most' popular social networking site to hit the scene. This one, unlike LinkedIn (although it has a whole other target, however users seem to be sliding towards Facebook recently), MySpace, and Friendster, seems like it could quite possibly be here to say. The proof is in the numbers.

Shrel Israel, social media guru, picked up the phone and contacted the corporate communications people at Facebook to get some numbers straight, here are some interesting tidbits he found out:

• Over 150,000 registrants daily since January.
• 35 million current users.
• In September there were no users from outside colleges, today that user base consists of over half.
• Average visitor stays for 20 minutes.
• 47,000 Facebook groups.
• More than 2000 applications.

The numbers speak for themselves. Facebook has grown in extreme popularity in such a very short time. If they keep this up, and keep users happy, they will be the leader for quite some time.

[via Web-Strategist]

If it seems like there's a new social networking site popping up every other day it's because, well, there is. A lot of us juggle registrations at multiple sites and sometimes there's a lot of overlap with out contacts so we were thrilled to hear about a new site that looks like it could help us keep our social networking organized and also search for friends and colleagues that have fallen through the cracks.

Though Spock is still at the invitation-only stage, were able to snag one and check out the up-and-coming site for ourselves.

Reid Hoffman made a "somewhat late" announcement on Friday at the Supernova 2007 conference to Dan Farber, that LinkedIn would finally deliver API's.

Developers have been eating up API's this past year alone, for every type of online environment including Google's mapping applications, to the recently released Facebook API's. However, it's not going to be available for quite a few months, nine to be exact. It's a little late for this long established business networking company to come to the table especially since Facebook is on the verge of stealing their thunder.

Taking a lead from the popular social newcomer, Facebook, this move by Founder Reid Hoffman is a way to develop LinkedIn into more of an online platform, and a way to get users who spend time on other social networks like Facebook, a way to get LinkedIn notifications wherever they are.

For about a month now, the kind folks at Plaxo have allowed us to play with the beta of Plaxo 3.0, a major update to their unique service that takes the 'management' out of desktop + online PIM. As if the present version's ability to synchronize your contact and calendar information between Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and some online services wasn't enough, Plaxo's ability to automatically update your address book whenever a fellow Plaxo user changes their information was a pretty unique feature that really let the company's vision shine. After playing with this new beta, however, we feel comfortable saying that Plaxo 3.0 could very well be nothing short of revolutionary to world of data management and synchronization.

While the Plaxo folk understandably won't allow us to spill too many details, we can at least give you a general overview of what all the fuss is about. The most significant change in this upcoming version is the addition of some major new 'sync points,' which are applications and web services Plaxo can synchronize with, impressively spanning the entire digital globe of OSes and web brands. In our screenshot above you see five points: Plaxo (of course), Google (yep: Gmail and, soon to come, Calendar), Windows Mail in Vista, Mac OS X's Address Book and iCal and even Yahoo!'s Address Book and (soon to come) calendar. Another major new sync point (requiring a paid Plaxo account) is LInkedIn, allowing users access the increasingly popular social network based on who has worked with who. Never before have we seen so much synchronizing power built in such a smart and streamlined tool. Amazingly, a lot of this new functionality will still apparently be provided for free, with a few select sync points and the rest of Plaxo's services (such as e-cards, Address Book recovery, storing more than 1000 contacts and 24-7 support) being made available to paid accounts.

Other new features in the Plaxo 3.0 beta reveal a new 'dashboard for your life' aspect to the service, which is also pulled off pretty well. Some of the online tools allow you to view basic things like the week's weather, while others allow you to easily watch RSS feeds for Flickr photos, friends' Amazon wishlists and blogs.

That's about all we should talk about for now, however, but stay tuned for a full review and screenshot gallery as soon as we can schmooze the Plaxo guys into greenlighting them. In the meantime, if you're already a current Plaxo user or we have just piqued your interest, we recommend cleaning up your address book and finally getting into the habit of actually jotting down your week's appointments and todos in Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar or any of the other services Plaxo will help you synchronize. This way, if you do it once, the new Plaxo should ensure you might never have to again.