Xoopit

» see xoopit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

xoopit was a browser plugin that added a horizontal strip across the top of gmail showing every attachment you had ever received as a thumbnail. photos from anybody who had ever mailed you photos, videos, pdfs, spreadsheets. you could click through into an album view and see a grid of media pulled out of years of email. the underlying trick was an indexing architecture inspired by web search engines applied to your local pst equivalent inside gmail.

bijan marashi and jonathan katzman founded the company in san francisco in 2006. seed money was $1.5 million in december 2006. accel and foundation capital led a $5 million series a in april 2008. peak headcount was small. the firefox plugin worked in gmail and yahoo mail, with a mypcs product for yahoo mail that emphasized photo sharing across group threads.

yahoo announced the acquisition on 22 july 2009. the price was undisclosed publicly but reported by the wall street journal at around twenty million dollars. by early october yahoo was telling xoopit users that the gmail plugin would go dark on 13 november 2009 to concentrate effort on the yahoo mail integration, which shipped as "my photos" inside yahoo mail. that was the death of the xoopit brand. the tech continued as a yahoo feature.

i missed xoopit at the time. in 2008 and 2009 i was on ttnet broadband at home in ankara, using gmail for university and a hotmail account left over from earlier, and i had never installed a firefox plugin for either. the specific problem xoopit solved (many years of attachment history spread across dense mailboxes) was more of an american power-user problem than something a turkish undergraduate had built up yet. i learned the name years later, backfilling.

~ the record ~

~ what it did ~

the plugin drew a translucent strip inside gmail's toolbar area. click it and you got an inbox-scale grid of every image, video, and document that had ever come through as an attachment. hover a thumbnail and you got the sender and the message date. click it and gmail opened the source message. the ux was faster than gmail's own attachment search would be for another decade.

a companion feature indexed media from linked flickr, youtube, picasa, shutterfly, and kodak accounts, so the same grid could show media your contacts had mentioned in email even when the actual file was hosted externally. the effect was to blur the line between your inbox and your friends' photo services.

~ the yahoo deal ~

xoopit was already yahoo's white-label technology inside yahoo mail's "my photos" feature before the acquisition. the two companies had been working together since late 2008, when yahoo mail opened its platform to third-party applications. xoopit was one of the launch partners. when yahoo bought the whole company in july 2009, techcrunch's headline was "why did google let yahoo run off with xoopit" because the plugin was arguably a better ux for gmail attachments than gmail itself had.

the answer was that google was rebuilding gmail search internally around the same time (this was pre-mailbox, pre-inbox by gmail, but the gmail team was working on threading and search improvements). yahoo needed a mail-differentiator badly. xoopit fit yahoo's need more urgently than google's.

~ how it ended ~

the shutdown notice went out in early october 2009. the gmail plugin stopped working on 13 november 2009. users were told the tech would live on inside yahoo mail. the founders folded into yahoo. the xoopit domain stayed alive as a redirect for a while and then quietly stopped resolving.

the "my photos" feature inside yahoo mail persisted for years but was slowly deprecated as yahoo mail rewrote its front end in 2013 and 2014 under marissa mayer. by the mid-2010s the xoopit tech had been abstracted away entirely. attachment search became a default in every webmail client without anyone remembering which specific plugin had proven it worked at scale.

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