ahpatel's dashboard

As cool as search and social network integration is, the thing that really sold me on Xobni was the analytics. I'm big on metrics so being able to see my email trends over the years is very enlightening.

That being said, I haven't really seen much development on this feature and have a few suggestions for improvement in 1.9:

1) Export to CSV or Excel. I'd like the ability to take the raw data and create my own graphs in a more sophisticated graphing program. The graphs Xobni creates are limited. For example, if I want to print a graph, it'll only print what is visible in the graph even though my date filter may be set for much longer.

2) Zoom/Scale Graph Timelines. I'd like better control over the scaling directly through Analytics. If I've selected a date range of two years and would like to see all data points at one time, how do I do so? At least on my 15.4" monitor, there doesn't seem to be a way to do this - I'm only able to see ~6 months at a time.

3) Save Custom Reports/Filters. Xobni is very good about giving me filtering abilities. This is useful for me to review things like - How often and how responsive am I to my most valuable clients? What time of the month/year does Company X email me the most? etc. I can gather these metrics today, but as soon as I close the Analytics window, I lose the custom filters I applied and that's just annoying!

4) Resize cell columns. self-explanatory, I think!

5) Folder clustering and full path tooltips. My primary data file is an Exchange .ost file. I AutoArchive pretty regularly to a local .pst and I use a different .pst for each fiscal year. So, when I look at the "Folders" tab in Analytics, I see multiples of every folder, one from the .ost, one from each .pst. So, for ClientX, which I've been working with for 5 years, I have 5 ClientX folders! It would be nice if Xobni was smart enough to cluster these (and, of course, provide the flexibility for me to cluster/un-cluster certain folders as necessary).

Furthermore, each entry shows just the title of the folder so I don't know which PST it's from without hovering over the "Total Emails" field and looking at the dates on the email (this works because I break my .pst's by fiscal year). It would be better if the full path was provided when I hovered over the Folder Name.

Let me know if more clarification is needed on any of the items.

Most of my contacts are not high profile, news-making individuals! So, I get more valuable news about my contacts through 'social' services rather than traditional news sources. So, a live stream of activity from services many of my contacts use would be more useful for me than the current 'news' I see.

This would be services like photosharing (flickr, picasa), geolocation (google location, brightkite, etc), social (facebook/linkedin status messages and whatever else the APIs allow you to pull), etc.

I find products like Xobni useful because they do this in a way where I actually discover an online connection where none existed before (via their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Hoovers integration). Gist needs to add something similar and differentiate by taking it further than just these services.

I have a lot of contacts with variations of the same company title. (i.e., Microsoft, Microsoft Inc., MSFT, MS, etc). I think Gist should be intelligent enough to group all those contacts as members of one company.

So, I'd either like to see see Gist provide intelligence into its Company database so that variations are merged on the backend and all these contacts show up when I do a company search. Or, give me the ability to mass edit all these contacts and change the Company name with one edit.

Feature Request: Delete Email in Future. One feature that would help manage email effectively would be an option to delete email on a future date. This would be useful in situations where you know the information won't be valid after a certain date, but you can't delete it just yet.

For example, if I get a coupon from an online retailer that expires at the end of January, it will be of no use to me on Feb 1st, but I'd like to keep it until then. The problem is that if I don't have an automated way to delete it, it won't be worth the effort to manually remember to complete this task later -- leading to email bloat.

Or, if you are going back and forth with a friend about a scheduled meeting, the email thread may be important until the meeting and maybe a week after. But, after that, there's no need to keep the emails.

Being able to remove these emails will remove worthless content from email searches, help me find relevant email/info faster, and reduce the size of indexes. I don't know any email solution that does this today so it would be a good differentiator.

// Anish