Rapportive just turned Gmail into a really useful Twitter client | Hacker News Reader

Rapportive just turned Gmail into a really useful Twitter client

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79 pointsrahulvohra18 comments

Here's a Venn diagram showing the relationship I want my Gmail and twitter to have:

O O

Could you explain why? Do you use them for completely different purposes? Don't trust the system at some point or another? Don't want to bloat either service?

That guy must be really, really, mad. Who would not like "allow access to data on mail.google.com"?

Well, I know for myself: email is enough of a distraction without adding twitter to it. Rapportive provides a useful service by providing me more information about my contacts. By adding the ability to reply to twitter, though, it becomes more than service providing information; It ends up becoming another possible distraction. No, I don't have ADHD. I just have little self control when it comes to things that pull me out of writing. My brain resists work.

Also, of course, there's the fear of inevitable feature bloat. A service that works well at one thing should continue improving in that area without adding unnecessary features.

Way too much sensitive data in my gmail account that I don't want broadcast to the world via twitter. It doesn't matter what kind of controls are in place, I'm not taking the risk that all of my online shopping, password resets, private email, etc. gets accidentally tweeted.

I can understand your concern, but the only time we tweet anything is when you click a button asking us to do so; it's very hard to imagine how we might introduce a bug which would accidentally tweet the contents of your emails.

I think his concern is not about a bug tweeting private contents, but any kind of exploitable bug that might give access to his account in any way, form or duration.

There's probably no way around this, since any addition is a possible attack vector.

I've been using rapportive for a few months and love it. It provides additional context about the person you're corresponding with - social profiles, crunchbase info, etc. It occasionally displays completely innacurate info, though. Somebody else using it recently congratulated me on a recent multimillion dollar investment... unfortunately that wasn't me, but a VC with the same name.

Apologies for that! Our data is now extremely accurate, apart from our CrunchBase Raplet — which is in great need of tender loving care. We'll get on it.

In the meantime, hit me up at rahul@rapportive.com and I'll sort out the error for you :)

It would be nice to be able to mark in the CrunchBase Raplet that the person the email is from doesn't match the CrunchBase profile.

Yes, that's the plan — we can then crowdsource that data and increase accuracy for everybody.

BTW- I might prefer Angel List data over CrunchBase, fwiw.

Rapportive is useful. I've found that I've written more personalized emails since I can see a pic of person I'm writing too.

It's also handy for small talk. "I saw your Tweet about Conference X, how was it?"

I used rapportive for a while months ago, but in my experience it slowed down gmail. I like the idea, but it needs to be lightening fast, or just load leisurely once gmail is up and running.

Improving performance is our number one priority at the moment. We aim not to slow down Gmail at all. Hope you'll give us a try again soon!

Great! I will!

I've tried rapportive around a month ago. Couldn't figure out what it does. All I see is a Rapportive menu item at the very top of my Gmail.

I tried it again now, same thing. I connected to Twitter and Facebook, that didn't do anything. I don't see any widgets or new features. I'm on Win7 + Chrome.

Seems useless.

Uninstalling...

Did you see the Rapportive sidebar to the right of a conversation? It should show you useful context about the people you're communicating with.

If not, do you perhaps have any conflicting Gmail extensions? (e.g. Better Gmail can conflict.)

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