About the video: by Bambi Francisco http://www.vator.tv

When Bill Gates demo's your product in front of thousands and calls it the "next generation of social networking," you can't get much better than that as far as endorsements go. But that doesn't mean Xobni, which co-founder and CEO Matt Brazina calls a "socially-aware utility that lets you find information fast" in your Outlook email, is going to end up in the Microsoft empire, especially if Microsoft isn't going to pay up. "That's not something I can really comment on," said Matt, in an interview with me.

No matter, Xobni, which was founded in 2006, makes better sense with companies like Google or Skype, he said. Xobni competes with companies, such as ClearContext, Xenbe and Xoopit. (Click her for my interview/story on ClearContext).

"If you go and look at other companies, they’d love to have access to what I call information workers homepage, which is Microsoft Outlook," said Matt. For instance, if Google wanted to get its Google documents to the 500 million Outlook users, Xobni would be its entryway, he said. Or Xobni could be interesting to Skype if it wanted to have the millions of users use Skype right from their Outlook, he added.