Xoopit turns Gmail

Xoopit turns Gmail into a gorgeous media browser

All these media-hosting and social-networking services are great, but there's been a relatively untapped resource in tracking what you're sharing: your e-mail in-box. Today a new service called Xoopit is opening up in private beta to Gmail users who are looking to not only sort through the deluge of photos, videos, and other files that make their way into your in-box, but add ways to share that media with social networks you're already using.

Xoopit's answer is to have you install a small browser plug-in and give it the credentials to your Gmail account. It will crawl over all the data, and within 24 hours the entirety of your in-box, sent mail, and mailbox archive will be able to be browsed and sorted through in a whole new (and I think far simpler) manner. While Gmail has its own search function, it's not so good when it comes time to browse and interact with media from those search results like Google does with Web queries.

With Xoopit installed you can view photos sent to you like a photo slide show. It does the same for videos and files too. (Credit: CNET Networks)

I've only had it indexing my in-box for the past hour or so, but it's already made my in-box a lot more useful. The latest media can be browsed in a little thumbnail stream on the top of the page, which reminds me a lot of a similar feature in Flock. Additionally, photos, videos, and files can be viewed off-site at Xoopit.com. It takes a similar approach to DropBox (review) in giving you a reverse chronological stream of your media that can be viewed, downloaded, and managed while away from Gmail. The same interface is actually a part of Gmail once you install the plug-in, so users will feel right at home in either location.

I must say Xoopit is off to a really great start. For a new app, I found very little to gripe about. It succeeds in two major areas: one in speed, since it doesn't slow down your in-box whatsoever, and the other in ease of use. The user interface is incredibly intuitive and provides a far better media viewing experience than Gmail does on its own. (Credit: Webware)