Rapportive - making excellent service scale
rapportive.com
rapportive.com
Just focus on two key things.
1. Understand the purpose of your page and try to do the least possible. Ex: explain what the product does or create hype, ease of sign up or show benefits of product etc. 2. Reduce the noise on the page so you can accomplish it well. Do this by either increasing contrast for the interface elements or reducing the number of elements.
Too often people get caught up in making it pretty. So their priorities end up looking like:
1. Lets make it pretty 2. Tell them everything about our product
And so for a lot of developers doing design they fail at the first step and ultimately end up with a poorly designed page that is crammed with info.
Take some pointers from these guys and when in doubt "show less".
This one gave me just that. Took me a scroll down the page, then up again, then halfway towards pressing backspace... Then I remembered! Whitelist NoScript temporarily!
Normally this comes pretty naturally to me because I can easily spot that a site is depending on Javascript or not.
So my mileage varied.
I'm not sure if NoScript has a way of telling you that you might be missing something on the page. Kinda like how Click2Flash tells me if it is a sIFR. That would seem useful for minimal landers like these ones.
- Security. They appear to be receiving my email address and those I interact with. I wonder how long they store that. I wonder how securely they encrypt that in their database, or if they don't encrypt that at all. Do they submit to annual security audits with that valuable information? Is any of that information subject to USA government security audit laws like Sarbanes-Oxley?
- Do a whois on them and you get a DomainsByProxy thing. That doesn't give one a warm fuzzy feeling, security-wise.
- The Notes area at the bottom -- does that mean that someone can write something malicious about me and everyone who receives an email from me, who has Rapportive installed, can see that message? Or, is that just a personal, private notes area just for me and no one else? If it's a public thing, then wow -- I have a serious problem with that.
In the absence of a written policy, we'll "treat users right" which roughly means we'll "treat users how we ourselves would want to be treated".
That's not particularly computable, so: the bodies of user's emails never leave the browser. We find email addresses in the browser, and send those back to our server to lookup. The emails themselves never touch our server.
That said, nifty idea. I'd like to see more website extensions like this, if there was a better security model.
Our users' trust is absolutely crucial to what we're doing, so you can expect detailed information on exactly what we do with your private data; and we may also make some things opt-in/opt-out. We have no intention of hiding anything.
You are already using GMail. How bad could it be?
Ah, those were the days ;)
For example, the last Fandango email I got served up a bunch of ads for roofing companies. See Alice in Wonderland and get my crawl space sealed! I guess...
Anyhow, Google wouldn't lose one red cent if I covered those ads up since they make money on a CPC (vs. CPM) basis.
"Sorry — currently we only support Chrome and Firefox. We will support more browsers soon (the next is probably Internet Explorer)."
No Safari? And it's not next on the list? That's a bit odd, given that they support Chrome.
Thanks for the heads-up.
You can use the following bookmarklet in Safari to get Rapportive: http://rapportive.com/extensions/safari/bookmarklet.js
The downside is that you have to manually start it in your Gmail tab. The upside is that most peoples' Gmail tabs are very long lived and, hey, it works in Safari :)
Unfortunately, I can't get it to work :(
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When "mail.google.com" loads (the "inbox view") the emails from people in my crm/social networks should be "glowing" or "jumping out at me". I LOVE your guys' product as is, but won't you really be maximizing efficacy by splitting the inbox into two "virtual" inboxes: one being messages to me from outside my crm/social network and two being those messages from people already in my crm/social network.
If you add this feature, not only will you meet your desired target demo use case but open yourself to the use case for average consumers who would like to only see gmail emails from facebook friends (and ignore the rest, aka SPAM). In this case I'd recommend your web app living a "dual-brand" life and branch development (if i had to guess this would double your odds of being acquired by Google, Google know's email's on it's last leg so if your app can bridge the old to the new (Google Wave) for both consumers and business users than whats a few hundred million to nab them up? lol)
Good luck! Thanks for rapportive!
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Do you guys agree? (that the "inbox view" would be the "killer feature" of this app)
Do you guys scan through all the emails at once or will I see that every time I open a new recipients email?
WOAH:\ Hope you guys can trim that down soon. At the minimum, you might want to state an approximate time on the right. I kept going back at the screen for 10-15m hoping it'd be done.
We want to make this experience better :)