I’m in Los Angeles just before Microsoft’s Professional Developers conference, where one of the themes will be Office 2010 and its new features. Yesterday though the streets near the conference centre were full of “ambassadors” for Xobni, handing out T-shirts to attendees going to pre-conference events and promising a chance of cash prizes if you are seen wearing one of them at the show.

Xobni is an Outlook add-in (read the name backwards) that pulls out contact details in a side panel as you read your emails, complete with previous activities and social connections from Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com and elsewhere.

According to the ambassador I spoke to, there is a similar feature in Outlook 2010; and the company is hoping that the hall will be filled with Xobni T-shirts when this is announced.

You have to give the company credit for its initiative.

Every add-on vendor has this problem – what to do if your feature ends up baked into the main product.

Picture to follow.