Ever since I read this article in GigaOm about Xobni, I’ve been excited to try it. It’s finally available to the masses, and it’s a pretty cool little application.

Xobni is “inbox” spelled backwards, and that’s pretty much where your traditional inbox ends. Xobni creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments.

One of the nice features of the profile is that it shows you the frequency of your e-mails, ranks users based on how many messages are exchanged (Geoff is my number 1), and shows a chart with the hour of the day that e-mails are most frequently sent, the number of e-mails received vs. e-mails sent and more.

Attachments are easy to find, as are conversations (e-mail threads) between multiple parties. Another great feature is the ability to call a contact directly using Skype and a quickly generated e-mail meeting schedule option which pulls free times from your calendar. You can also compose e-mail directly from Xobni (it will generate a new Outlook message) by clicking on a link in the toolbar profile.

In addition to the handy toolbar on the side of your outlook (which can be minimized if you don’t want to look at stats), there is an analytics program option that reveals even more into your daily, weekly, and monthly email usage. The ability to switch between line and bar graphs is also cool, and the breakdown between hour, date, time, etc.

A daily view of mail traffic can reveal that you see a big increase during the middle of the week.

A weekly view shows steady traffic back and forth, with fluctuations for high-pressure times (around a product launch, large pitching initiative, marketing campaign, etc.). You can view a daily summary of e-mails, including “unique people” (which separates out groups), and sent to received ratios.

There is an easy option to share reports by e-mail, as well as copy, print, and save functions. The tool offers options on how you want to view your email (say, only Monday-Friday), a useful welcome video and support FAQ and contact form.

Buzz Meter: 4 out of 4 Buzz Bees

Positive: For people who don’t like to sort and search through e-mail, this is a handy way to view recent conversations, sent attachments, and networks of relationships. This is an exciting, useful and functional tool that is great for stats geeks and people who want a better way to organize their inbox.

Negative: Xobni is not available for Mac users or those running earlier versions of Outlook. Also, some people may not want another toolbar added to their e-mail (although you can minimize it).

Conclusion: Xobni is a nice tool that is fairly unobtrusive, while allowing stats geeks the ability to fully analyze their e-mail usage. Xobni has the ability to show people how they are using their time, and maybe push them to strive towards a 4-hour work week, e-mail free.