triangular dreams

Xoopit, a San Francisco-based company, has developed technologies that can turn your GMail (or for that matter, any IMAP email) account into a social environment that is most relevant to you. The company, which also is announcing a new $5 million round of funding from Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, is part of a growing number of startups that view the inbox as the ultimate social network.

As I have argued time and time again, the inbox and the mobile address book are two natural social environments. It’s heartening to see innovators trying to capitalize on simple common sense. Of course, it’s even more delicious that giants who own our inboxes — Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL — are simply twiddling their thumbs.

If you take two of the more popular social networks — Linked In (professional) and Facebook (personal) –- as examples, the amount of email generated by these systems (if you don’t want to spend your entire day logged into them, that is) is astounding.

So it stands to reason that if you could develop hooks to various social services from within your email inbox, your entire experience would be much easier to manage. This is Xoopit’s approach. It’s launching a Firefox plug-in that basically looks through your GMail and automatically imports information from major photo and video services such as YouTube, Flickr, Kodak, Shutterfly and Picasa Web.

In other words, if you receive a URL link from one of your friends via an email, the photos appear in what’s essentially a gallery view. Similarly, you can share your photo and video galleries with your address book contacts without making your friends go to different sites; simply clicking on a photo rearranges the layout of GMail to offer you the option to share. (Check out the gallery of screenshots.)

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