Gabor Cselle and Greg Duffy from Xobni gave an excellent keynote at the AAAI Email Workshop. Amongst other insights and Xobni anecdotes, their combined presentation gave an overview of just how difficult and painful it is to integrate new ideas into existing email clients like Microsoft Outlook. Such pain is, unfortunately, unavoidable if you’d like your ideas to reach any of the 400 million Outlook email users out there in the world.

The exciting news I took away from the Xobni presentation was the plan to open up external access to developer APIs to access and extend Xobni’s sidebar. This is what LinkedIn has had access to in order to achieve the recent integration with Xobni, and might be a less painful path to Outlook integration for other developers in the future.