Yahoo Acquires Xobni

Yahoo has just announced that they’ve acquired Xobni, the startup that tries to make your inbox and contacts list less terrible by focusing on the people you communicate with most.

(To answer the question that most people are probably wondering : it’s pronounced Zob-Knee, and it’s “inbox” backwards.)

Back in 2007 (at TechCrunch 40!), Xobni launched as a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that sorted all of your correspondence by contact, automatically pulling in each contact’s data from the likes of LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks. Over the past few years, they’ve rolled out similar functionality to Gmail, iCloud, and (fittingly) Yahoo! Mail. Around the end of last year, they launched Smartr Contacts — an app that sorted your contacts by their perceived “importance” — for iOS and Android.

There’s no official word yet on how much the acquisition was finalized at, but previous rumors had pinned it at between $30M and $40M. We’re still trying to confirm a number with our own sources. Update: According to our own sources, the final price after consideration was factored in was closer to $60M. The company had raised almost $42M to date, says the Crunchbase data.

Okay, Yahoo, seriously, I’ve run out of “Ha-ha-ha, Yahoo bought another thing” jokes.

As for the future of Xobni’s existing products: the company says that if you’re already using Xobni’s stuff, you’ll be able to keep using it indefinitely. No word yet on whether or not they’ll let more people onto the Xobni-boat moving forward, though their Smartr Contacts app still appears to be available on at least the iOS App Store following the announcement.