Xobni, inbox spelled backwards, is basically a Microsoft Outlook plugin that applies social networking into your email platform. The plugin provides you with some advanced search functionalities for email conversations, contacts, and attachments. By searching for contacts, it pulls up all the conversation threads with that person, contact info, attachments, and email analytics. Earlier in the year, Microsoft made a $20 million offer to acquire Xobni, but the company turned down the offer.

Below is a video of Bill Gates talking about Xobni so obviously it is an impressive tool that impressed even Bill Gates. Was it a good idea to turn the deal down? What exactly do they want to achieve from a Microsoft Outlook plugin software company? Ideally, I would think that getting acquired by Microsoft is probably the best thing to come along but obviously, they have other plans in mind. This may end up being a big mistake on their part. If Microsoft was interested and got turned down, is there really a chance that they or anyone else would offer more in a year or two? My thinking is probably not. Microsoft, being one of the biggest corporations in the world can easily have its own set of engineers come up with something similar and better that it can incorporate into the next version of Outlook. Once that exists, there may not be any reason to use Xobni.

Searchme is an interesting visual web 2.0 way of searching on the internet. I discovered this company at the Techcrunch50 conference and was pretty impressed. When you search using Searchme.com, instead of just giving you text, it shows the actual websites with a scrolling functionality. The pages actually load pretty fast and if you havent tried it, it is worth checking out. When you first see the site, it basically looks like something that would be very useful on the Iphone or on a computer with a touch screen feature and it actually has the app ready but is waiting for approval from Apple. The product is currently in public beta and currently allows for search on the web, for video, and images.

There is also a neat feature called Stack where you can drag and drop websites that you want to look at later. You can save these websites or videos in stacks that you can save or share with others.