Poor Man's Xobni?Poor Man's Xobni?

How much social networking integration does your email client really need?

I'll guarantee you, that's a headline I could have never imagined myself writing back when I was covering the Stephenville, TX City Council, in a previous life. The turn of phrase comes courtesy of TechCrunch, which uses it to describe the new social integration features of Microsoft Outlook 2010.Xobni pretty much pioneered this kind of social integration for Outlook, beating Microsoft itself to the punch with a plug-in that became popular with, among others, a considerable chunk of Microsoft's own internal users. And Xobni caught our eye last year when the startup scored an investment from Cisco, foreshadowing the move to the desktop that Cisco made more decisively at the end of last year, with its massive collaboration announcements.

So now, TechCrunch reports, Outlook itself is going to have some of these social networking integrations natively, presumably in the hope of keeping the Cisco-funded Xobni from boring even deeper into the heart of its user base's desktop portal. TechCrunch clearly isn't that impressed with the Microsoft effort, both in terms of functionality and in terms of its effect on the functioning of the Outlook client itself.

I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but all of this really makes me sketpical that you can really unify communications with a PC/laptop desktop portal. I mean, you can; you can put all that stuff in there. The question is, will it work?

This next part is anecdotal, but it's not anecdotal in the way that your typical marketeer presentation goes--you know, talking about how their solution solves that problem where you're headed to the airport and you're standing in line in security and you're trying to reach your team blah blah blah--typically, road warrior stories that are only valid examples to other road warriors.

What I'm talking about is something that I think could happen to just about anyone. There's something funky going on in our office network that causes my connection to our Exchange server to get dropped several times an hour. In fact, it just happened while I was writing that previous paragraph. Sometimes, like just now, it reconnects within about 5 seconds. Other times, it won't reconnect and I have to close out Outlook and re-open it.

This may not be Outlook's fault; I assume I'm losing connectivity to the Outlook server, so it's likely the network's fault. I tend to connect to the office WiFi rather than my docking station that's on the wired network, so maybe there are some hiccups in the wireless. Nobody else seems to be having the issue.

The point is, if I were relying on some extension of Outlook--say, Office Communicator--to be my phone, it'd never work. And again, because this is a network problem, presumably the same would hold true if I were using something other than Outlook--Sametime or whatever.

Sure, I could quit being stubborn and just connect to the docking station, but that doesn't seem like the answer you want to give if you're the communications vendor--sort of runs counter to all your other marketing messages about communications however/wherever etc.

Common sense and a few years of experience tells you that the more crap you load into a browser or application, the less stable it becomes. So I guess what I'm really asking is, who really needs these social networking integrations in their email? I get along fine keeping a browser tab set to Twitter or Facebook and toggling back and forth. Are we over-engineering these portals?How much social networking integration does your email client really need?