Anthropologists Amazed at Email and Social Network Mashup
Fourscore minus seventy years ago, in high school, my English/History class – you know, the interdisciplinary college prep class that was supposed to turn us into ‘critical thinkers’ before we ever set foot inside a college lecture hall – had us do an exercise in the field of anthropology. We were given an essay on the Nacirema people and told to analyze them using Edward T. Hall’s Primary Message Systems.
I dove right into the ethnography, summarizing here, extropolating there, and proudly turned in my essay (which probably looked something like this) only to walk out into the hallway and have some smart-aleck class-ditcher say, "Dude. Did you get it?" Meaning, the whole thing was a joke – Nacirema is American spelled backward, and every cultural oddity that we had just analyzed was in fact, our own.
Ten years later, I’m flashing back to that moment because of one word I just read: Xobni.
Now that’s just silly.
There’s been talk about the ridiculous names that web entrepreneurs were coming up for their new babies: Zing, Bebo, Etsy. "...the naming trend has also drawn considerable eye-rolling among Web
denizens, inspiring tongue-in-cheek pages like Web 2.0 Name Generator
and the quiz “Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character?"
And Xobni is no different. At least they actually tell you that it is "inbox spelled backwards". Thanks guys. With a mission of "taking back the email inbox" for its users, Xobni (and Xoopit - another name that would be torn apart at recess) offers an integration of social networking and email – GigaOm calls it a relationship and interaction manager.
In other words, the relationship buckets (and the level of intimacy)
are already predefined and have relevance. From there, all
communication-related information — mobile numbers, geo-location data,
instant messaging identities and of course, email addresses — are just
a click away. So what’s missing? Discovery and presence, and
synchronicity.
Will we find all these – and more! – these two San Francisco based startups? That remains to be seen. Xobni is not yet in Beta (someone please explain to me what that means! or better yet, tell me to get off my lazy ass and look it up!) and Yahoo is getting on their horse, or rather, their Zimbra, to compete.
On your mark, get set, GO.
