14 DAY TRIAL // Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo!'s Vice President of social search, has left the building on Friday, but his vacation will have been short-lived. Today, he is set to accept the job of CEO at Xobni, a startup with an aim to make Outlook e-mail smarter, as Erick Schonfeld of Tech Crunch reports.
Jeff's time with the Sunnyvale-based company was a good one and he brought Yahoo! a lot of fame, glory and there was something else. Oh, how could I miss it? Users. He brought flocks of users to Yahoo!'s Instant Messenger service, during his reign as VP in charge of the product, it surpassed AIM in number of users and the revenues went 6 times higher than before. If you're a frequent Y! Mess user, you must have noticed the avatars and the different means of customizing them. That's his work as well. Other departments he worked in number Yahoo! Answers, which has sort of a bad rep in the online world, and Delicious. Both of them got swallowed by other groups recently, so he went on to the position he got fired from.
Are you still expecting Google's G-Drive? The online storage capacity that will let you back up your files and access them from anywhere in the world? you know how it goes, it got tremendous coverage when rumors first appeared, and after that on a periodical basis they emerged again. Bonforte was the guy that first had the concept in mind, back in the 90s, when he founded i-drive. Had it not been too early for such a good idea, right now he probably would have been the one doing the firing.
Xobni seems to have thrilled Jeff: "Just fixing Outlook is a huge opportunity," he told the cited source. "The inbox is still fatally flawed. It is hard to find stuff, hard to find people, hard to understand the network of relationships in your inbox." With his experience, he'll definitely get it right.