Gmail and Google Contacts, brought together by Rapportive (YC S10) | Hacker News Reader

Gmail and Google Contacts, brought together by Rapportive (YC S10)

blog.rapportive.com

45 pointsrahulvohra13 comments

This is great - I've been using Rapportive, and I also use Google Contacts as my main address book.

The problem with Google Contacts, for me, has been that it takes a long time to load --- sometimes as long as 20 seconds. I've always found this odd, and expected it to speed up eventually, because Google is supposed to be obsessed by speed...

It seems I spoke too soon. It's only nine days later, and Google Contacts has changed: Now it's way faster, and looks a lot different too!

"Except there's a problem. When a contact emails you back, you don't see their business card. If you want to phone them, you have to jump from Gmail to Google Contacts via a series of clicks just to even see their number. This is crazy..."

Hover over the sender name in an email or the inbox and a 'card' pops up with picture etc. Click their name to see all details. 1 click, not too crazy.

Good catch — I didn't even know you could do this. I always used to click on the contact, click on "More", and then click on "Contact Details". I much prefer not having to have click at all :)

Very nice addition.

The first thing I noticed is many of my Google Contact entries are woefully out of date -- even for my own wife, yikes. Once I made the change, it does not seem to have updated her phone number.

Have I missed something? Or could this be slow because it's a new feature everyone is playing with?

Hi there, we should pick up the change within 24 hours - unfortunately the sync is not instant.

Based on the time of your comment, it should have updated by now - if we're still not showing the updated phone number, could you email supportive@rapportive.com with details so we can take a look?

Indeed it did. Thanks for the follow up.

Rapportive is a great plug-in, but I'm still curious about the upcoming premium version alluded to by one of the founders on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/What-is-Rapportives-business-model

Thanks! You should see paid-for features later this year. Everything that you see today should remain completely free.

Does Rapportive support reformatting of phone numbers? I just realized that quite a few of my numbers are in different formats and would love an app that puts things in standard +(country) (rest of number) format.

Also, is the Rapportive support bidirectional? I.e. data discovered is written back to Google Contacts. This way, any changes would be auto propogated down to my mobile device.

I'd also love an app to go through my phone numbers and internationalise them. It would have to be a semi-automated process, as I've got contacts with local numbers in a number of different countries.

The Google Contacts support is currently one way, but it's a great idea to write the data back. Could you please vote on it here: http://rapportive.com/feedback/527051 — that way you'll be kept in the loop as we make progress :)

What mobile device do you use?

Multiple. webOS and Android.

It would be interesting if you could somehow tie into webOS Synergy services.

If the internationalization app is sufficiently smart, it should be able to detect local numbers for different countries and at least make an attempt.

I really enjoy using Rapportive. The only thing I feel it lacks is the ability to join my personal address book in Gmail and my contacts in Google Apps (without merging the libraries, but just searching in both for data and notes).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com