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Tech & VC 19 Sep 2007 03:03 pm

Whose Your #1?

xobnifred.pngUSV has been consumed by Xobni. Fred invited me to reflect on it today, so I’m doing that now.

Xobni is a great productivity tool; however, everyone at USV is getting very distracted by Xobni at the same time because we’re all playing a game I call: “Whose Your #1?”

As you can see in the screen snippet on the right side of this post, each person you email gets analyzed by Xobni. It gives you a histogram of emails per hour from this individual, total communication stats, and some other interesting stuff like phone numbers from sig files which I’ve cut out of this pic.

The most interesting stat Xobni gives you is a ranking (see bottom right of the pic). I’m not exactly sure how the ranking is calculated, but it’s clear that the ranking is a proxy for the people you communicate with most and I’m pretty sure they bake recency of communication into this ranking. Xobni doesn’t give you a view anywhere in their interface of people sorted by their ranking, so to figure out a person’s ranking, you have to search for them in the Xobni search box and look at their profile ranking. This makes for an interesting game: try and guess who are you top 10 ranked people.

This game seems so simple, but it’s deceptively difficult. As you can see Fred’s my #1. I know that Brad is my #2, but #3 is eluding me! How can the third most popular person I email be so hard to identify?! Yet, I’m sure when I find it, it’s going to be a total “oh Duh!” moment because all the other rankings I’ve found seem perfectly accurate.

Dorsey has been the big winner at this game so far. She’s identified everyone in her top 10 except #7. The rest of us are falling behind, but not for a lack of trying.

I love the unintentional (or intentional?) gameplay dynamics in Xobni. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a killer productivity tool, but the procrastination it has given me today is even better. I’m feeling the itch to stop blogging and go back to playing with Xobni right now.

Comments (3)

3 Responses to “Whose Your #1?”

  1. on 19 Sep 2007 at 4:44 pm 1.Deva Hazarika said …

    Andrew,

    Our company makes a perhaps more “traditional” productivity solution for Outlook. For example, instead of displaying contact rankings at that discrete a granularity, we put them into buckets of “Very High” “High” etc. However, if you find the gaming aspects of Xobni interesting, you might want to take a look at Seriosity, who are directly applying multiplayer gaming concepts to email management and prioritization. I write a bit about the space, Xobni, ClearContext, and Seriosity in this blog post: http://blog.clearcontext.com/2007/09/welcoming-xobni.html

  2. on 20 Sep 2007 at 4:08 am 2.tim duncan said …

    Isn’t this just the outlook equivalent of “how many friends do you have?” on facebook.

  3. on 20 Sep 2007 at 7:24 am 3.Andrew Parker said …

    @Tim I think it’s more along the lines of the MySpace Top8… but yea, similar idea. They’re all popularity contests.