Xoopit Launches Very Useful Social Search for Gmail; We’ve Got Beta Invitations

Xoopit is out today with a private beta of their new social search addon for Gmail which turns your Gmail mailbox into something more usable. How many times have you tried to find an attachment only to have to open email after email? Xoopit’s search gives you back that time by allowing you to search for an attachment within your Gmail account. You can also search for people, files, pictures, and other forms of media. The images below show what the Xoopit plugin looks like – it sits to the right of the Gmail panel.

Xoopit calls their technology, "Personal Indexing" and it supplements generic search by crawling media shared via email as links from across the social web.

There’s also a social media component to the release which allows you to attach photos from a variety of services including Flickr directly inside of Gmail. After you find the photo you are looking for, you can attach it to an email or send it to the top social networks including Facebook and MySpace.

Seems like they are going right after Xobni on many of their features – Xobni focuses on Outlook, Xoopit on Gmail. Xoopit has plans to expand to the other major online email services including Yahoo Mail, AOL and Hotmail.

Jackson Latka brought up a good question on Twitter – what about security. Xoopit needs access to your Gmail account to access their service. Are you comfortable giving up this access? I also struggle with Google using one account for everything – if I give them access to Gmail, they can also access any other Google service with the credentials.

If you’d like an invite to the Xoopit beta, just register here.