Currently in private beta, Xoopit’s core product turns the inbox into a rich social media browser for your stuff inside the inbox and across the web. Powered by Xoopit’s personal indexing technology, the product not only finds and organizes attachments, but also crawls the media shared to users as links from the photo sharing sites and social networks such as Flickr, Picasaweb, Kodak, Shutterfly, etc.
Xoopit’s newly released GMail Media Search, enhances Gmail’s standard message search by adding media results to the right side of every Gmail search query. Users will be able to immediately access the files, photos, video, and people returned from their Gmail searches.
The company is initially focusing on Gmail and iGoogle. Users can also go to www.xoopit.com to view their media outside of Gmail using Xoopit’s new search tool.
This represents a new genre of search, creating an online social media browser that turbo charges the formerly localized search experience for the large webmail services as well as the social web to help people discover, organize, and share media.
Historically, mail is one of the first and important social applications using the web. To date, it boasts over one billion users – perhaps the greatest social network of all.
Social networks have seen the value of extending social functionality beyond text, which has evolved into a plethora of creative applications and induced new economies along with it. They’re flourishing – lead by the likes of Facebook and Myspace.
So the question is, mail providers, with your billion users, when will you open up to innovation and bring your users into the 21st century?
In the meantime, the first 500 people to click this link will receive an invitation to join the private beta.