Get early access to the Rapportive UI when composing emails | Hacker News Reader

Get early access to the Rapportive UI when composing emails

rapportive.com

24 pointsjamesjyu14 comments

I've been using Rapportive for a while now, and it's wonderful. I have some attention issues, and often I forget who I'm emailing (this isn't a troll) - especially when it's not someone I usually communicate with. Having the profile right next to my email gives me a quick refresher, and brings me back into focus. Having the LinkedIn right on the side also lets me add people and browse quickly, without having to open a new window myself. The only annoying part, is when I'm following up an email, and I hit reply - it shows me, instead of my contact.

I wonder how they plan to monetize this.

You can change who Rapportive shows by typing email addresses in the To: field and cousins, and by hovering over email addresses or names in subject lines.

Maybe we should tune things so we show your own profile less.

Monetisation will be done by freemium features, and will happen soon (those features are entering ß now). What you currently use will remain free :)

Edit: I just reread your comment and realised I misunderstood. To stop your own emails showing up when you reply, please claim your email addresses: http://blog.rapportive.com/claim-your-email-addresses — does that help?

Hey, thanks for the response. If you want some feedback:

Yeah, I think you should add something to not show our own profiles (I never forget who I am!). This actually reminds me of my friend's dumbphone. When he goes into his Sent Mail folder, and selects a message, and tries to add a contact (the person he send the message to), the phone tries to add his own number. While it makes sense logically, in the context it's not very useful.

Two other issues I have with it are on a design level for the new Compose profiles. At least in the classic theme, now the white Rapportive appears over the blue gmail send. I'm not sure how much of that you can manipulate, but shifting the blue over to the left (kind of like what's done with reply) would be preferable.

Also, on Reply, there's an alignment problem with the Share Rapportive link up top - it's slightly shifted to the right, so that it doesn't seem to align.

Lastly, I found a minor bug. Your Share Rapportive button appears fine, but I'm guessing you got rid of it (or Gmail automatically does) if the window is minimized small enough. The problem is, that it doesn't re-appear, even if you change screens. I haven't done any heavy testing on this, but the first two brief tests seem to give these results.

Sorry if I'm wasting your time - hopefully this helps. Send me an email if you're not sure what I mean and I'll give you some screenshots when I get home.

Edit: Claiming makes sense. I forget I send emails from my Gmail as more than one address. Though, can you use the emails to check via LinkedIn or something, to see if the sent user email corresponds to the same account as the original email, and if so, display the sender 1 up? Not sure how efficient that is - just brainstorming solutions since I doubt the majority of people will think to claim their emails.

"Also, on Reply, there's an alignment problem with the Share Rapportive link up top"

Can you please send me a screenshot of this? rahul@rapportive.com

"Though, can you use the emails to check via LinkedIn or something"

Yes, we can make very intelligent guesses on what your emails are, but we haven't yet got round to doing it :)

ps. if you haven't seen it already, do checkout http://rapportive.com/feedback — it's where a lot of brainstorming goes down

Sent. Good luck!

Rapportive is so great, I want to give them some money.

Let's see if Rapportive can get all this type of info into Contacts. That's the next place where this would make the most sense.

Do you mean an UI level integration, or actually putting the data in contacts?

I would say the data in contacts. Imagine if Google Contacts was robust enough with Rapportive technology to be the one place to >>view<< all relevant info on a contact (email, FB, Twitter, etc.) rather than have to wait for context (to read or write an email).

Interesting idea, but the following warning scares the hell out of me: "It can access: Your data on mail.google.com".

Just to note that installing any Chrome extension will give you a similar warning. In fact most of them say "It can access: Your data on all websites." (In Firefox you don't get a scary warning, but it's still true!)

When you install a browser extension you need to trust the extension authors. In this case, rahulvohra's link below may help you decide :)

Privacy is something we thought long and hard about; we go to great lengths to ensure we're doing the right thing.

Please do checkout http://rapportive.com/privacy

Does that help address what was scaring you?

In fact, it does greatly help. You are making a strong privacy statement. Just to explain my initial concern, the warning implied that the extension can read my private mails and that is what triggered my bad feelings.

BTW. It would be great, if Chrome extensions would allow to add a link to the privacy statement which is then displayed in the context of the warning.

I personally don't like it, because it really does not give any information about the sender. Just my opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com