Yahoo is killing support for a popular Gmail plug-in from Xoopit, a startup it acquired in July. An email was sent out today to Xoopit users on Gmail tited, “Xoopit for Gmail is closing. Here’s the info you’ll need.” It details different ways users can export their files, photos, videos, and other attachments which may be stored on the service. From the email:

We will be officially turning off Xoopit for Gmail on November 13, 2009, to focus our efforts on making My Photos for Yahoo! Mail an amazing product and bring those features to all Yahoo! Mail users. Given our focus, we decided we cannot adequately support the Xoopit for Gmail product and give you a great experience in the future. Here are some details to guide you through this transition.

Xoopit is a handy email plug-in that works with both Gmail and Yahoo Mail, where it powers the My Photos feature. In Gmail, it creates a strip across the top which shows you images of all recent attachments, making it possible to visually scan email for their contents instead of by subject lines. You can also click on the Xoopit thumbnail strip so that it takes over the whole screen with a grid of photos, images,videos, and docs.

Back in July when Yahoo bought Xoopit, we wondered why Google didn’t buy it instead. Now at least we know why Yahoo bought it—to take it away from Google (and it’ also a really cool feature). Yahoo certainly has the resources to keep supporting the Gmail plug-in, which is very popular Shutting off support is a small gesture, but it shows that Yahoo is starting to play for keeps. And it doesn’t want to share its toys with Google, despite all of that talk about how open it is.

Xoopit essentially offers an easy way to organize and manage e-mail, having invented an indexing architecture similar to web search engines that helps users retrieve content from their archived e-mail, including attachments.

The startup raised a total of $6.5 million to date, securing seed funding amounting up to $1.5 million back in December 2006 and raising $5 million more from Accel Partners and Foundation Capital in April 2008.

Ever since its public launch, the startup has been focusing a lot on ‘upgrading’ Gmail, bringing an enhanced media search feature and direct Facebook connections to Google’s free webmail service. In fact, their focus was so clearly set on Gmail that the startup’s ‘About’ page currently speaks of nothing but the webmail service and how it improves its users’ experience in terms of e-mail management.

Sure enough, Xoopit was also a featured app on the Yahoo Mail applications platform since the latter debuted last December, but I can’t help but thinking it should have been Mountain View pulling in Xoopit instead of Sunnyvale.

Think about it: Gmail and by extension Google Apps are core products for Google, which is in essence a search engine company. Xoopit enhances the search functionality of their web-based e-mail service. You’d think it’s a no-brainer for Google to go after the startup if they knew its management and investors were open to a sale.

And if the selling price was really only $20 million, it’s not the money that would make Google think twice. With a bottom line like Google’s, an acquisition of this size is basically pocket change for the company, and yet they’d be picking up an agile startup creating a product that’s highly relevant to their core service offering. Furthermore, it’d make for a great talent buy, if only for the startup’s founders Bijan Marashi (ex-Telecom Italia, Inktomi and Microsoft) and Jonathan Katzman (former exec at TellMe Networks and also an ex-Softie).

Kudos to Yahoo for snapping up Xoopit – I realize it makes sense for them too – but why didn’t Google make this move?

Starting today, that list includes other tools like online payment handling platform PayPal, basic photo editor Picnik, Xoopit service MyPhotos and file sharing application Zumo Drive. If you already have access to the applications Yahoo brought to Yahoo Mail back in December, you’ll notice several of the apps the next time you log in, located along the left side of your inbox.

Thanks to the integration, Yahoo mail users get access to a number of useful services without the need to leave the communication interface. That way, Yahoo intends to increase the stickiness of one of its core products, in a relative, open-minded way. After all, users now don’t need to leave the interface to e.g. crop photos, transfer money, share large attachments with others, and so on, and Yahoo is not restricting itself to using or building proprietary tools.

Gmail, your turn.

In related news, Yahoo is also adding a good number of OpenSocial applications to MyYahoo today.

More on today’s Yahoo Mail announcements in this quirky video:

Xoopit, a social networking email enhancement that allows users to locate files, images and videos in their inbox, has launched a new feature that lets Gmail users immediately see and set Facebook status messages and view profile photos of their Facebook friends while reading emails off a Gmail account.

Users can also quickly see other information such as birthdays and mobile phone numbers. After downloading the feature, a user can easily update their own status directly from a Gmail account using Facebook Connect. Xoopit’s new feature is pretty neat and gives users the ability to bounce between Facebook and Gmail accounts seamlessly. And Facebook’s status message feature is one that most users check most frequently, so its particularly useful to the average Facebook user.

The marriage of social networking and email is not a new concept. Yahoo and Google are both pretty open to incorporating social networking into their email applications, with Yahoo even potentially creating a social network around its email product (Yahoo mail has around 254 million users worldwide, Gmail has around 80 million users).

It doesn’t appear that the Xoopit-Facebook feature is available to Yahoo Mail users but the Yahoo and Xoopit may not be far away from developing a Gmail-like relationship with Yahoo, as we wrote about late last year.

The plug-in was a bit buggy when I downloaded it but I think its a nifty tool as a whole. It certainly saves me the time in switching back to Facebook to check status updates or update my own status. Now if only we could stream the news feed feature into Gmail.

Here’s another screenshot of the new feature:

Xoopit, the social webmail plugin that indexes your Gmail account’s media attachments, has launched Gmail Media Search. The new feature compliments Gmail’s standard text search by including a sidebar that lists file attachments, photos, and videos. The first 500 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will gain access to the service, which is currently in private beta.

The Gmail Media Search sidebar separates search results by type, offering thumbnails of the top matches from each category in a manner that resembles Apple’s Spotlight. Users can also hone their searches by only listing content that has been received from certain contacts. In practice the Media Search is a perfect compliment to Google’s standard search, though I’d like to see some more options (for example, the ability to check off certain file types to search).

As we noted in our original review, Xoopit goes beyond simply searching through attachments by crawling your inbox for links to media. This means that when someone sends you a link to a Flickr album, the photos within that album with be indexed and searchable as well.

For now Xoopit is only available for Gmail, but the company has plans to expand to other webmail platforms like Yahoo Mail and AOL in the near future. They also plan to integrate the new media search with their iGoogle widget, which should make finding photos and attachments even more convenient.

You can check out a screencast of Gmail Media Search here.

We are building an index of your personal information across the Internet. Email is the most important repository of your personal data. Xoopit processes the social media you have been piling up for years and transforms it into a fun application.

The application indexes your Gmail (other email services will be added in the future) and lets you view attached files (photos, videos, etc). It also fetches any images that friends might have emailed you from Flickr, Picassa, Shutterfly, Kodak, or YouTube. It is an attempt to turn your email inbox into a dashboard for managing all the pictures and videos everyone emails you all the time. In turn, you can post your own photos, videos, and other media directly to Facebook, your blog or email from the application.

Xoopit is also announcing a $5 million A round from Accel and Foundation Capital. It previously raised $1.5 million in an angel round from Foundation Capital, Michael Dearing, Jeff Ralston, and Eric Telenius.