Best new gmail add-on: rapportive

Life Technology
1

If you’re flooded with e-mail and you sometimes forget exactly who it is you’re communicating with, or if you’d like to know more about someone new that you’re corresponding with, try out rapportive.com. :thumbsup:

[quote]Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.

You can immediately see what people look like, where they’re based, and what they do. You can establish rapport by mentioning shared interests. You can grow your network by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more. And you can record thoughts for later by leaving notes.

Imagine relationship management built into your email. For free.[/quote]

2

You have just changed my Gmail world. That’s pretty amazing, since I’ve been using it since the first days of the beta (five days in) and have never heard of this one.

Thank you! :bow:

3

Holy cow, that’s awesome! Using it right now to screen my Forumosa Friends!

4

It’s good if you’re into social networking online.

[quote]You can immediately see what people look like[/quote] I use several email addresses. Each address has a different purpose. My private gmail account is comprised of only people I know in person. I know what they look like and they know what I look like.

[quote]where they’re based[/quote]I know where they are based and they know where I am based.

[quote]what they do.[/quote]I know what they do and they know what I do.

[quote]You can establish rapport by mentioning shared interests. You can grow your network by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more.[/quote]My private network isn’t online. I don’t use Facebook, Twitter and the likes. My wife, on the other hand, is really into networking online. The amount of time she spends on facebook alone is ri-di-cu-lous.

5

Great find! I get a lot of emails from people I don’t know, so this is a good way to give me some more background on them (although most still show “not found”).

Is it just me or does this feature end up covering the ad section?

6

[quote=“Adam_CLO”]Is it just me or does this feature end up covering the ad section?[/quote]That’s another awesome feature! No more ads in the sidebar!

7

[quote=“Adam_CLO”]Great find! I get a lot of emails from people I don’t know, so this is a good way to give me some more background on them (although most still show “not found”).

Is it just me or does this feature end up covering the ad section?[/quote]
Yes, and can you believe that some people have complained about it in the Rapportive feedback forum?

8

[quote=“RobinTaiwan”]It’s good if you’re into social networking online.

…

My private network isn’t online. I don’t use Facebook, Twitter and the likes. [/quote]
Ditto.

I understand the power of the social networking sites for commercial purposes, and everyone has different priorities and purposes for their online activities, but for me, there is no benefit to having my contact list intertwined with the contact lists of everyone I know, and everyone they know and everyone THEY know, and so on. People have different social groups that have nothing in common with each other and connecting them doesn’t make sense for me, and there have been many stories about how it has landed people into hot water.

Rapportive sounds useful, though, for people who do share their contact lists.

9

That’s the thing though. The person on the other end doesn’t know that you can see their info. He thinks he’s anonymous to you when he’s not.

I noticed this about the Facebook app on iPhones. If you choose to sync your contact profile pictures with Facebook, I assumed it would go through your Facebook friends list and sync their photos. However what it does is go through all your iPhone contacts and sync their pictures with their Facebook accounts, regardless of whether they are your Facebook friends or not. I had 1000+ contacts on my iPhone, most of whom I don’t know, since they are strangers who email my support website. But all of a sudden I had many of their photos showing up. Kind of eerie.

10

[quote=“CraigTPE”]I understand the power of the social networking sites for commercial purposes, and everyone has different priorities and purposes for their online activities, but for me, there is no benefit to having my contact list intertwined with the contact lists of everyone I know, and everyone they know and everyone THEY know, and so on. People have different social groups that have nothing in common with each other and connecting them doesn’t make sense for me, and there have been many stories about how it has landed people into hot water.

Rapportive sounds useful, though, for people who do share their contact lists.[/quote]
You’ve misunderstood completely. Rapportive doesn’t share/intertwine contact lists, and it doesn’t disclose the contacts of your contacts. The information about you that is viewable on Rapportive depends on your online presence - it doesn’t require any participation in Rapportive at all.

Rapportive is about knowing who you’re talking to. Obviously, for some people, this isn’t necessary. They’ve got twenty people with whom they correspond and they can easily stay caught up. For me, I have ALL of my e-mail accounts stream into one gmail account, and I get A LOT of e-mails every day. Every single person that registers on Forumosa, for instance, goes through me first. Rapportive gives me a quick snapshot of who that person is on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Flickr - whatever accounts they have associated with the e-mail address they’re using. It also let’s me add my own notes about the user - “Don’t call this woman before noon ever”, or “Don’t mention the war”.

So, if you want to be anonymous on the net and off of Rapportive’s radar, don’t use the e-mail you use for correspondence to register for any accounts. Use it only for correspondence.

On the other hand, if you’re engaged online, through business, social networking, goofing around, whatever, then you should know that others can now find out a lot about your online presence without even looking it up. They just have to glance to the right of the screen, where the ads used to be, and find the relevant information.

11

So anything that I’ve used my correspondence email address to sign up for, will now show up on the side of the screen when I send someone else an email?
Any way to opt-out of Rapportive?

12

No, unless you also choose to opt out of the Internet. Basically, Rapportive doesn’t do any research that an individual couldn’t do manually, it just does it a lot faster, and gets rid of advertising at the same time. It can’t link to any pictures that you have marked private, and it can’t link to a blog that isn’t associated with the e-mail address that you’re using.

13

[quote=“maoman”][quote=“CraigTPE”]I understand the power of the social networking sites for commercial purposes, and everyone has different priorities and purposes for their online activities, but for me, there is no benefit to having my contact list intertwined with the contact lists of everyone I know, and everyone they know and everyone THEY know, and so on. People have different social groups that have nothing in common with each other and connecting them doesn’t make sense for me, and there have been many stories about how it has landed people into hot water.

Rapportive sounds useful, though, for people who do share their contact lists.[/quote]
You’ve misunderstood completely. [/quote]
No, I don’t think that I’ve misunderstood at all.

I am not saying that Rapportive is sharing your e-mail or your contact list, but the social networking sites you join ARE. If one is not a member of any social networking site, then their e-mail is probably not being shared as rampantly and therefore not receiving piles of e-mails from unknown people, making a program like Rapportive less compelling. I don’t have any accounts on any social networking sites and seldom receive e-mails from people I don’t know. Nor do I have any interest in knowing which social networking sites people belong to who send me e-mails.

However, for those who do have accounts on social networking sites probably do get more e-mails from people they don’t know, and for them, Rapportive must be quite useful.

But, perhaps I have misunderstood.

14

That depends entirely on the privacy settings you have on the other sites, and has nothing to do with rapportive. Like I said, it doesn’t show you anything that you haven’t made available to the world wide web in the first place. The only neat twist is that you don’t have to do the leg work. Oh, and the fact that it gets rid of annoying ads, which for me is also an added benefit!

15

That depends entirely on the privacy settings you have on the other sites, and has nothing to do with rapportive. [/quote]
As I’ve written, I don’t have any accounts on any social networking sites (except MSN, which is now social networking, much to my dismay), therefore a moot point.

16

I just noticed that it appears to affect Gmail’s security settings so that the connection is via HTTP instead of HTTPS. Probably not a big deal but be aware.

17

That isn’t happening for me. (Firefox). That’s weird.

18

That isn’t happening for me. (Firefox). That’s weird.[/quote]

It might be a Chrome thing.

19

That depends entirely on the privacy settings you have on the other sites, and has nothing to do with rapportive. [/quote]
As I’ve written, I don’t have any accounts on any social networking sites (except MSN, which is now social networking, much to my dismay), therefore a moot point.[/quote]
Here are the other sites that rapportive searches:
* About.me
* Academia.edu
* Airbnb
* Amazee
* Amazon Wishlist
* Amplify
* Angelesia
* AngelList
* aNobii
* Bandcamp
* Bebo
* Behance
* Beyond the Whiteboard
* Bitbucket
* BlackPlanet
* Blip.fm
* Blippy
* Blogger
* Boomkat
* Care2
* Code Project
* CouchSurfing
* CrunchBase
* Delicious
* deviantART
* Digg
* Diigo
* Disqus
* Dopplr
* DoYouBuzz
* Dribbble
* Drupal
* Econsultancy
* .extendr
* Facebook
* Favstar
* Flavors.me
* Flickr
* Flixster
* Formspring
* Forrst
* Foursquare
* FriendFeed
* Friendster
* Geni
* Get Satisfaction
* GitHub
* GoldenLine
* Goodreads
* Google Profile
* Google Reader
* Gowalla
* Gravatar Profile
* Hacker News
* hi5
* Huffduffer
* Hunch
* Hype Machine
* Hyves
* Identi.ca
* iLike
* IMDb
* IntenseDebate
* isalso.at
* iXimati
* Joost
* Last.fm
* LibraryThing
* Lifestream.fm
* Lightstalkers
* LinkedIn
* LiveJournal
* Livemocha
* Masterbranch
* MeAdiciona.com
* Mendeley
* Menéame
* Mixcloud
* Мой Круг
* Multiply
* My LEGO Network
* MySpace
* Netlog
* Orkut
* Pandora
* PerfSpot
* Photobucket
* Photosynth
* Picasa
* Pip.io
* Plancast
* Plaxo
* Plurk
* Polyvore
* Posterous
* Quora
* Qype
* Readernaut
* Reddit
* Renren
* ResearchGATE
* ReverbNation
* Shelfari
* Skitch
* Skype
* Slashdot
* SlideShare
* SmugMug
* SoundCloud
* Stack Overflow
* Steam
* Storify
* StumbleUpon
* Tagged
* Tagwhat
* TakingITGlobal
* thesixtyone
* TimesPeople
* TripIt
* Tumblr
* Tungle.me
* Twitter
* TypePad
* Uservoice
* viadeo
* Vimeo
* VisualCV
* VK
* Wakoopa
* WhatPulse
* Windows Live
* Wordpress Support
* WordPress.com
* XING
* Yahoo Pulse
* Yelp
* YouTube

20

How is it linking information to you? There are a number of people on the net with my name, and I use different email for different apps e.g. hotmail for facebook, but gmail for linkedin. How smart is Rapportive, can it work around this?