For all the hype about social networking Web sites, the most popular and successful way to network over the Internet is still the oldest: e-mail. If it's organized properly, boring old e-mail can reveal as much or more information about the people you know and their relationships with you as hipper services such as MySpace or Facebook.
This is especially true if you are the kind of person who saves most of his or her e-mail. That mound of messages can be a treasure-trove of contact information and a history of your interactions with hundreds, or thousands, of personal and business acquaintances. It can tell you the phone numbers and job titles of people, and even whom you and your correspondents most often copy on e-mail. It's a sort of social network all its own.
The trouble is, it's hard to tease all that information out of the typical e-mail program. And that goes double for the most popular but most bloated and dense e-mail program of all: Microsoft Outlook.
Now, however, there's a new, free plug-in module for Outlook that adds a set of social-networking and data-mining features right inside the venerable program. This new plug-in for Outlook is called Xobni, which is "inbox" spelled backward and is pronounced "ZOB- nee." It is completely contained in a colorful vertical panel that lives on the right side of your Outlook screen and doesn't block or intrude upon Outlook's own panes or functions.
I've been testing Xobni, and I like it. The product has some flaws and is still a work in progress, but I found that it made Outlook much faster and more useful. Xobni turned my Outlook experience from one that was organized by messages and dates into one that was organized by people, relationships and histories.
Xobni, available at www.xobni.com, works...

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