Yesterday, you could read on Techcrunch that the Xobni application for Blackberry was just an indirect way to invite its users to send their emails from their Outlook account to the cloud. Xobni One would be the name of the cloud server where Xobni now hosts its users' messages across several social networks.

To refresh the memory of those not familar with Xobni, it is an application for Microsoft Outlook that runs your email usage data against other social data like your contacts and communications on Facebook and LinkedIn. The outcome is an application that helps you keep track of your conversations, and that is able to spot important messages in the mass of innocuous emails.

Bringing emails to the cloud is not new: Technically, Gmail is a cloud-based email provider. However, during the Microsoft domination, desktop-based clients were king, because it was easier to sort out and file evertyhing from our local machines.

Days are a-changing, we don't just have one email inbox anymore. Other social networks provide an appealing way to connect with friends, and yet another email inbox to send private messages to one another. Our communications are scattered across the social Web, and we need a solution to 1. gather it all in one place, 2. easily search through it, and 3. access the data from anywhere. Hence the need to centralize our data in the cloud.

I have already talked about how Cotweet and Exacttarget have joined forces to combine email marketing and Social Media marketing. I don't agree much with this model, but I feel any startup out there that tries to consolidate our online communications.

In the Techcrunch post about Xobni One, the author of the post, Erick  Schonfeld, seems to criticize Xobni's strategy to move its users' data to the cloud (Xobni users can't access Xobni on their Blackberry if they do not send all of their data to Xobni One first). I think it is perfectly logical for Xobni to create a reason (the Blackberry app) for its users to migrate their data to the cloud. Why else would they do it?

Silentale has an answer too: It offers their users to connect all of their online communications to silentale, and then it hosts everything on the Web, it provides great search features and it makes our communications data available from any desktop or mobile device.

We need solutions like Silentale or Xobni, because they help us a great deal to organize our social lives, may it be in a personal or the professional sphere. I am not a Xobni user, nor a Silentale user (but I've tried them both), but the Web is moving to the cloud, and we'd better be prepared for it.

By the way, read this excellent post on ReadWriteWeb to get some advanced views on the future of the cloud.

Didier Gaultier