Introducing the people widget | Hacker News Reader

Introducing the people widget

gmailblog.blogspot.com

40 pointssorbus9 comments

Obviously this is competing at least somewhat with Rapportive. I wonder if this will actually consume users of Rapportive because it's good enough, or if it will boost Rapportive's coverage and use because of the competition.

If I were to make a guess, however, I'd guess this is "good enough" to steal a large number of users from Rapportive, or rather people will just stop installing the Rapportive add-on.

I doubt they care if a single user is stolen from rapportive. There are a massive number of gmail accounts and all of those people that have never heard of rapportive will now have a new feature they may benefit from in some way. For the small percentage of gmail users that have heard of rapportive and have chosen not to use it for whatever reason (trust/security) we also may see some rapportive like benefit. While this is clearly inspired by rapportive I can't imagine the goal was to steal users from them.

Oh, I don't think their intent was to steal users from Rapportive, I was just speculating on how this feature would affect Rapportive.

I think it's really stupid to announce this stuff before people can actually use it. It's one thing to have a feature in your product. That's great. But if no one uses it, it's worth way less. It's not helping your word of mouth, and it's not helping people stick.

Google, Twitter, Facebook post stuff like this all the time, and I think "wow, that's cool. I'd like to try that." And I fire up my mail, or my FB or my tweets and it's not there. And I think "oh well, I'll see it eventually."

But I often don't. This happened last week, but I've forgotten entirely what the feature was, which product it was, or even what company. One of those three. They could've got me using the new feature, but now I may never discover it.

Lost opportunity. Impotent press.

I love that the image has a status message saying "I'm hosting game night tomorrow night" and that the message was posted "five days ago." How useful!

I guess this is a staged rollout, as I can't see it on any of my accounts? (Including a corporate one)

Also, how does this affect the positioning of adverts that currently fill this space?

From the article: "which is why over the next two weeks we’re rolling out a new people widget located on the right hand side of your messages."

Thanks. That was superseded in my mind by "you can now see contextual information".

I'm guessing it will be a long time before the People Widget works in Google Apps. Meanwhile, Rapportive works right now in Google Apps and regular Gmail :) </blatant plug>

Interestingly the way the People Widget occupies that space is by covering up the Gmail ads, just like we do.

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