Good riddance to Google Wave.

I never understood what the fuss was about.

Wave may have been clever programming, but it didn't do anything other applications already did better. In fact Google has better tools for most Wave tasks.

It did instant messaging although Google already had one and a half tools that do the same job very well.

Wave did communications. Why bother when Gmail is so much better?

Wave was a collaboration tool. Who needs that when collaborating on Google Docs is so easy?

There was a social media twist to Wave, but Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are all simpler to use and way more polished.

Wave had a bad user interface and was difficult to use.

More importantly, it was difficult to understand what was going on and what one was supposed to do.

Rapportive is a Gmail add-on. It shows information about the person who sent an email. Think of it as a basic CRM system.

The data replaces Gmail's right-hand advertising panel – which won't endear Rapportive to Google.

There's a similarity to Xobni, which works with Microsoft Outlook. But Rapportive is lighter. Xobni runs on your PC, while Rapportive lives in the cloud.

Rapportive pulls information from social media accounts linked to the person's email. This means the results are variable. I've noticed plenty of information and even photographs for some of my contacts, but for many there is nothing.

I've written before about Xobni and about Gist, which is a more complex, variation on the same theme. I prefer Gist to Xobni.

Three months ago I tested Gmail. My plan was to spend a week running all email through Gmail on my desktop, laptop and hand-held computers.

I wanted to move all my email accounts on all my systems through a single application as a way of simplifying things.

In practice it worked well. Routing my Gmail, POP3, Google Apps and Yahoo accounts through one in-box made sense.

Being able to see the same messages through the same interface across my three systems made sense. The experiment was so successful I stayed with it for three months.

There was one small problem with Gmail: integrated search. It is easy to search Gmail messages. Email search is faster and more efficient than Outlook search tools.

I missed not being able to search Word and OneNote documents, text, HTML and email documents from a single, central location. But I figured this was only a minor irritation.

Then Windows 7 came along, with its vastly improved integrated search. It is noticeably better than Vista search and it works better with Outlook 2007. So much better, that I've reinstated Outlook 2007 as my main email hub. I can use Outlook 2007 on my desktop and laptop, but not on my Palm hand-held.

This hardly matters, it's not the best device for writing email – though it's a good tool for reading emails. And anyway, I suspect my trusty old Palm TX is not long for this world.

Update: I forgot the other bonus. Outlook 2007 integrates nicely with OneNote while it is a pain moving messages from Gmail to the application.

Gist cuts through the deluge of incoming email, tweets and other messages. It sorts, highlights and presents your most important material in a simple format.

After one day of using the application I can see it has potential. It may become a lynch-pin. But I'm not yet  convinced I'll use it over the long-term. Here's why:

Gist works with Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook inboxes, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Salesforce. The software is a free web-delivered or cloud application. There's a paid subscription version in the pipeline.

Like Xobni, Gist digs through your past emails and organises information, appointments and correspondence. Unlike Xobni it pulls together a range of information sources. That's smart, email is only one of a number of information channels most people deal with.

Gist displays data on a dashboard where you can quickly see what the software decides is your most important messages. You can also view the information by the contact name.

Gist analyses your contacts then ranks them based on the number of communications with each person. The idea is to help you automatically filter out noise and focus on the most significant material.

Gist simplifies

In practice, it works, but only up to a point.

Here's what it does well:

• Gist does a great job of pulling together incoming material from different sources. I'm testing it with Gmail, Twitter and LinkedIn. Between the three I may have hundreds of incoming messages each day — in fact these are mainly tweets. Putting them all in one place is helpful.
• My contacts have been automatically ordered in a league table, with the most important at the top. The list is good, but it's not perfect. The people I'm working with are all on the first page, but there are people on the page who I don't know well.
  And I'm not impressed to see Gist's TA McCann as my most important contact.
• I don't use Salesforce and I haven't yet tried Gist with Outlook so I feel a bit of a fraud for including this under the what Gist does well heading, but the software appears integrate smoothly with these applications – which will certainly make it a powerful option for those people using either product.

Here's what's not so great:

• While Gist is good at deciding who your most important contacts are, it can't decide which material from those contacts is the most important. In my industry there's a lot of chatter on Twitter and the occasional gem. Material from LinkedIn contacts is important but not vital, but most incoming emails are vital. I'd like to tell Gist to give incoming email more weight than tweets – perhaps I can do this and I just haven't found out how, it's only been on my machine for 24 hours.
• I still feel deluged. It's easier to get at some of the important material. I could use Gist instead of Tweetdeck. And it's a better way of checking out LinkedIn updates than the RSS feed I use. But Gist is probably not going to replace my email inbox soon.

Better than Xobni

The headline says Gist is better than Xobni. The last time I looked Xobni only worked with Outlook, although it can pull personal information from Facebook and LinkedIn. Gist adds Gmail and Twitter putting it way out in front.

Xobni integrates with Outlook, but the composite screen is cramped on my desktop display and hard to view on my laptop. Gist on the other hand is browser-based (although there are integrated versions) and is easier to read.

Lastly, I found Xobni was slow to use and I suspected it slowed down Outlook as well – although I couldn't quantify this.

First: Gmail

Getting a Gmail address was trivial as I already had a number of existing accounts. I’ve decided to forward everything from everywhere to a single Gmail account and gradually stop using all my old email addresses.

If you don’t already have a Gmail account, just hop over to gmail.com and sign up – you’re late to the party so you won't great choice of available names. This doesn’t matter as nobody has to see your Gmail address.

Second: Domain name

Again this was straightforward, I chose a .co.nz name because New Zealand is a small country with an uncrowded domain name register which made it easy to get the domain name I wanted. It cost NZ$40 to own billbennett.co.nz, but New Zealand names are renewed annually which is a pain.

Third: Host

My existing web host was good enough. There’s a minor technical problem which causes problems elsewhere, but the one I use isn’t expensive and the company is easy to deal with.

I pay NZ$130 a year for 100MB of storage and plenty of bandwidth. You don’t need much of either to handle an email account, so opt for the smallest possible hosting plan unless you aim to use the service for something else.

Fourth: Set-up mail account

My host uses a program called Cpanel. It allows me to manage the site through a web browser. I opened Cpanel and clicked on the Mail icon. A list displayed with a number of options, I chose Add/ Remove/ Manage Accounts. From here I added the email account bill@billbennett.co.nz.

You need to set up a password and a quota at this point – which is an amount of storage space to set aside for email. I’m not planning to keep any email on the server, but during the testing stage I set aside 2MB of storage. This was a good move, because I hit a minor snag.

Fifth: Redirect

I struggled  finding out how to redirect email traffic from my host using Cpanel. That’s because I used the Email Domain Forwarding option. While this looks like the right tool – it isn’t. I then tried, incorrectly, setting up forwarding from Cpanel’s built-in Horde web mail program. The correct tool to use at this point is cryptically listed in the Cpanel/Mail menu as Forwarders.

Here you need to click on Add Forwarder and then enter the new email address followed by the Gmail account where you plan to receive your mail.

Sixth: Tell Gmail about your new account

I did this by logging on to Gmail, clicking the Settings link at the top right of the window and then on the Accounts tab. Here I added the new address, verified it, then made it the default.

It’s a good idea to test your new email address at this point. When I did this I had some problems with the redirecting and found my emails sitting in the Horde web mail inbox on the server at my host.

Now, my next job is to make sure the new address appears everywhere online. This will take some time to fix. I made a good start by Googling my old addresses, but there are hundreds of instances so it’s not going to happen overnight.

While the latest upgrades to Xobni give Outlook another shot in the arm, they underline the shortcomings of desktop email. Giving up on Outlook and moving to Gmail may be a better option.

Xobni ( inbox backwards) turns everyday email into a relationship management tool by focusing on people and not messages.

The program is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in. It sits on top of the application and digs into Outlook’s data, slicing and dicing it to emphasis your links with contacts.

Xobni’s toolbar occupies the right hand side of Outlook’s main display providing contact information about the person who sent the incoming message.

You’ll see the person’s name at the top of the Xobni pane along with their photo if you’ve stored one in your Outlook Contacts. You’ll also find statistics on your communications with them and a rank – so you’ll know something about that person’s relative importance to you.

If there is a phone number anywhere in the messages or contact details, it’ll be shown – it’s clickable. Likewise a link allows you to quickly schedule a calendar appointment with that person.

Xobni shows recent conversations and email threads between you and the person in question along with clickable links to any attachments that have travelled between you. There are also improvements to Outlook search – though Microsoft’s updated desktop search nullifies the value of this.

Xobni's instant productivity pay-off

On their own, none of these features are earth-shattering; together they deliver an instant productivity payoff. You’ll find you won’t need to switch between your messages and contact database – that’s a time saver in itself. You’ll also need to run fewer searches – just about everything relevant to an email is quickly to hand.

Some of Xobni’s features seem advanced. For example, the program does a good job of figuring out when someone uses more than one email address and lumping all their messages together. Another neat trick is the way it mines emails for the names of other people in your contact database, then displays them in a clickable form.

Xobni isn’t just about improved productivity; it also delivers a fresh people-oriented way of looking at information allowing you to build better relationships.

So why am I not convinced by Xobni?

I used Xobni for a few months when it first appeared this time last year. While the application looks good and can boost productivity for some users, I found it didn't me in any practical way. If anything, Xobni reports are a distraction. They are pretty to look at and interesting at first – but that’s about it.

What’s more, Gmail has improved to the point where its now perverse for a person working alone to prefer Outlook. Ironically, Gmail’s weakness is the way it handles people. If Xobni worked with Gmail, the developers would have a killer product on their hands.

Finally, Xobni slows Outlook down and on occasion stops it from working — albeit temporarily.

Xobni makes sense if you work for a company where you have to use Outlook, live in Outlook and the support policy is liberal enough to allow you to install it.

To me Xobni is the chrome plated hub caps and giant tail fins on those beautiful, but dinosaur-like American cars from the 1960s in an era when we’re all driving more practical Toyotas. It an anachronism.