In other news, King Herod announces free daycare for all infants under 1 year old.

In response to the question below, I really couldn't see Microsoft being able to stomach a rails application. They really are all about the 'ecosystem' of Windows.

Xobni's competition is Microsoft. The only good thing I imagine that could come from this is getting ahold of the next Outlook to see how many features MS adopted and figure out how Xobni can adapt.

Hardly. We're making Outlook "cool again" and they're helping us do our jobs by giving us the support and software we need to do so. It's a complete win-win.

Microsoft will do what is best for Microsoft. They always have done what is best for them and they continue to do so. Microsoft takes the best add-ons and features from competitors and adds them to there own software. That is not a bad thing, Apple does it too. It just means that as they do, you have to figure a way to improve upon there new offering.

Agreed. However, Outlook is released so infrequently (~3-4 years) that by the time they could replicate and release the same features that Xobni is offering now, we'll be way ahead of them.

"Microsoft will do what is best for Microsoft"

and how is that any different than 90% of other companies?

Microsoft is different because they play both sides. Just as long as no one is lulled into a false sense of security, that was the meaning of my post.

Once I saw this, I looked on the Xobni blog to see if they had a better story but there wasn't anything. If you have a better link, post it as a comment.

?

Interesting. This gives me the heebs a bit... I wonder how valuable it is, in the end. I suppose it's a good set-up for potential acquisition, but I wonder how much they tie you to their platform. Could a site that uses rails get in if they had a .Net client app, for example?

Wonder what the fine print of THAT agreement is like...

I can't help but think they may have accidentally sold their souls for free copies of Visual Studio.

Congratulations!

Of all the posts I've read YCers make, this is the one that most looks like a press release.

That's because it is. Look on the Xobni blog for a post that shows a little more love :-)

Sorry, I was actually talking about that very blog post. I should have pointed that out.

yeah, i kinda felt corporate writing it. Sorry. I wasn't very inspired by the announcement of the MSFT accelerator press release. The press release was pretty much all boiler plate and had to be approved by MSFT.

You should check out the post I wrote right before the accelerator post. It is much more my style. http://www.xobni.com/blog/2008/01/21/celebrating-user-happin...

I should add...

Our involvement in this program is about more than free copies of Visual Studio. MSFT is helping the participating companies develop credibility with large MSFT software consumers. This is particularly valuable outside of Silicon Valley.

I think Loopt is the only other YC-funded company participating in the program.

OK, cool.

Kudos for the authenticity; it's no doubt harder to keep it real as the company gets bigger and has to avoid saying controversial things.

What does this mean for future web-based (e.g. gmail) versions of Xobni?

ummm.... congratulations?

Wow, free visual studio... doesn't anyone hack .net in vim?

Though I do use VS a lot, I actually do use vim -- and awk, grep, sed, etc -- when VS/Resharper can't do the tricks I want.

PuttyCyg/Cygwin provides a nice shell + unix tools on Windows.