As many of you saw (we know because usage has been crazy!), we recently announced a deal with LinkedIn where you can seamlessly receive important information and photos of your contacts directly into your Xobni sidebar. Our mission is to help our users get the information they need right into the inbox.

Today, we’ve expanded on that effort. We’ve been working with Facebook and are announcing today that we are among the first participants in Facebook Connect, which brings Facebook profile information right into the Xobni sidebar. Once implemented, Xobni will be leveraging Facebook’s massive global user base and development platform to automatically show your contacts’ Facebook profile pictures, status, recent photos, mutual friends, location and online presence inside Xobni. Now that is a handy use of your social graph!

This integration speaks to the ever-increasing importance of social networking data and Facebook’s prominence in the space with over 70 million users around the world. The Xobni sidebar in Outlook will display public data from Facebook profiles and will also offer the user an option to sign into their Facebook account through Xobni and view private data like photos and status messages for their Facebook friends. By leveraging the profiles of Facebook users, Xobni provides greater context around emails by seamlessly informing you of what else is going on in your contacts’ lives.

Facebook has become a killer social app for tens of millions of people, serving as a new kind of address book for keeping track of contacts. A recent Washington Post article on the future of address books spoke about Facebook, LinkedIn, and the value of the data trapped in social networks. The article also spoke about how Xobni is advancing the address book for email: “The best you can get is a free plug-in for Outlook called Xobni.” We believe that combining data from social networks like Facebook with Xobni will make us all better at personal and professional relationship management.

We’ll be sure to announce here on our blog, to our mailing list, and in our forums when Xobni with Facebook integration is available. To signup for this and future announcements, please do so on our download page (look for the “Keep in Touch” box where you can type in your email).