What is Xoopit And Why Care? – Fast Friday Fact

by: George Bounacos Friday, July 24th, 2009

: Image via CrunchBase

Yahoo! continues pushing good news out as fast as the PR team can get clearance. When a company misses earnings, continues dissing a Fortune 50 suitor and goes it alone against entrenched competitors on every side, splashing every announcement is critical.

That’s why you may have heard a lot about Xoopit this week and wondered what all the fuss is about.

Xoopit, which was available for Gmail and is now part of Yahoo!, mines your email for photos. In Gmail, Xoopit would send an email every week with a look back in time. In its new corporate home, the company is no longer accepting new (free) users with Gmail accounts. Existing accounts are grandfathered in as the detente in the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft oligopoly continues, but we can all be confident that Xoopit’s new function amounts to a Yahoo mail plugin.

The entire company has been smartly rebranded in hours and is being incorporated into Yahoo! mail.

Xoopit is just one of my companies creating mashed-up features for existing hit products. Companies like Remember The Milk (tasks in Gmail) and Plaxo (web synchronization of Outlook accounts) are making a name by riding alongside an established brand and large customer base. RTM got burned when Google unleashed its own task functionality, but in Xoopit’s case, doing well for the company resulted in acquisition.