Xobni Decides To Start Making Money, Launches Premium Upgrades For Your Smarter Inbox
Xobni Plus has a heavy emphasis on improving search, which is one of the key components the service has always been based around. Users will now be able to craft more advanced search queries, using either a GUI-based ‘query builder’ or Xobni’s own markup language, which lets you manually specify attributes like “attachment=yes” or “from=Jason” (Gmail offers similar search features, and they are very handy once you’ve gotten a hang of them). Other improvements include Xobni’s autosuggest feature, which can use linked Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to pair Email address with full names, as well as the ability to search within your Xobni ‘feeds’ in the sidebar.
Xobni may be calling this a ‘Plus’ version, but pretty much anyone who uses the service with any frequency is probably going to want to upgrade (I’d be surprised if the company puts much effort into adding new features to the free version after this). Xobni is expecting fairly broad uptake by its users, so it’s pricing the upgrade at a modest one-time fee of $29.95. However, the company also has more task-specific “Pro” features in the works that will likely appeal to different segments of their userbase, and it sounds like these will be more expensive (a mobile-only premium product is also in the works, with plans to release it later this summer).