Creo Six Degrees 2.0 was recently released and includes a free version as well as more expensive $99 Personal, $199 Anywhere Edition and a $299 Workflow Edition. I could see wanting to use this up to the Anywhere edition as a single user if you needed the mobile (Palm or Blackberry) connection.
Basically, Six Degrees is Zoe, but with a revised UI and seemingly more features that currently don’t work for me since I am not using Entourage or Outlook. It’s quite easy to import messages from mail accounts (POP or IMAP) and have your information indexed and cross-linked with contacts, conversations, projects and files. It’s a very nice idea that while it takes a bit of getting used to can be quite helpful.
At the moment, I’m giving the free version a shot… It automatically imports my mail at a set interval so my datafile is always current. I’ve found from my Zoe experience, that leaving this running in the background is simple to do — it’s actually invisible, with no app running in the dock. When you need to reference something the server is running — it’s your computer after-all. You simple queue up the browser of your choice and search or browse away. A quick keyword search reveals pretty much anything your messaging clients have touched and with whom you’ve been in contact. You can easily create more conversations simply by initiating an email which then links back to your mail client.
I’ve used Zoe for quite a while, and while it’s far from a daily thing, it’s been very helpful in tracking down messages and discussions not easily found for whatever reason in my local app. I imagine that Six Degrees will work quite similarly…