LinkedIn Neutered Rapportive Today
ahamlett.com
ahamlett.com
Let me explain. A while back 'friends' started popping up in my suggestions list. I noticed that many of these were 'private' email addresses, ie email addresses i've used to sign up for a service, and were used only there, and nowhere else. I do not use these addresses to send email, they're only used to receive emails (newsletters etc).
When i approached linkedin about this, they claimed i'd given them permission to access my gmail contacts on the mobile app. When i asked them for an exact date, they could not provide me with one, but responded with inStructions on how to remove these contacts.
I'm 99% sure that i have never done so, i'm very very careful about this (manage a list of 15k+ members of an organization i run). The answer also did not make sense, because many of these suggested contacts should not show up in my gmail address book (receive-only, no interaction).
My theory is that they've used the rapportive lookups to build a database of email addresses checked by my rapportive addon whenever i happen to click on an address in my inbox.
If you search online, you'll find many people complaining about linkedin 'inviting' contacts without the initiative being taken by the user, and others who wonder how linkedin knew that they were acquainted with some of the suggested contacts.
I must admit i have not bothered to gather conclusive proof of this, but like i said, many of the suggested contacts were single-use (generated on the fly on my own domain, anyone not found is forwarded to my admin account).
I have disabled the rapportive addon after their response because i no longer trust it. Did miss it for a while, but with the changes outlined in this article, that's no longer an issue either.
Ps i was one of the first 150k members of linkedin. Used to think they were the only decent social network in town. This trust has been lost forever. Guess that's hat happens when you go public. Growth required at all costs.
They really are gobbling up everything they can, and even if they say they are removing stuff, they never will.
In this case, you would have had two years to see this coming (and if you check out the comment thread from when the acquisition happened, you'll notice that everybody did see it coming) and do the rather straightforward development work to get a new version up and running. Then all you'd need do is drop a link in this thread right here today to your feature-wise Rapportive clone that actually still works as advertised, and you'd have 326,000 new customers tomorrow.
Acquisitions are a risky investment. You buy a company and it might turn out to be worthless.
Connect6 uses LeadFerret to power their plugin, which is even worse.
Disclaimer: i am the founder.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rapporto/lobacefbn...
EDIT: Looks like FullContact does this: http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/person/
We always encourage potential customers to try other services. With over 500 paying customers of the FullContact API from some of the internet's largest SaaS providers, we're pretty confident in the quality and quantity of our data.
Bottom line is, none of us will have the same amount of data as Rapportive, because Rapportive had direct access to LinkedIn's data warehouse. (And as we all know, LinkedIn has never been shy about hoovering up data from anywhere it can get it.)
I just requested beta invite on your website but didn't see your contact details (mine are in my profile).
Having said that, I am baffled by this. While I appreciate that there is a battle own an individual's primary social network and spend more time/content on LinkedIn vs say Facebook. But, IMHO, wouldn't it have been more prudent to build up the functionality of the LinkedIn component while still offering the functionality that 300k plus users obviously wanted anyway? While this will probably be re-offered (it now looks that it is) as a LinkedIn only plugin, LinkedIn are limiting their reach to only LinkedIn users.
Had they continued to build the multi-network capabilities and brought the marketing/reach of LinkedIn to the product, I dare say they could have owned a significant portion of all GMail users and likely been no.1 in the space. Controlling that (and offering preferential treatment to LinkedIn) what definitely add value.
Who knows the end result, but it looks like a missed opportunity that someone else will come in and take.
When LI bought Rapportive they bought access to my entire actual social/contact graph, whether I wanted them to have it or not. I've never done the "upload your contacts so we can spam them" on LinkedIn, but because of Rapportive: every one I email, and everyone who emails me, LI knows about. They know the frequency of my interaction, all in exchange for giving me a bit of information about the people who write me.
They must have reached a point where either they have mined it sufficiently (and new installs are low) to not worry anymore about crippling it, and/or they realize that the bulk of the data that users care about is the LI data anyway (true for me), and they'd like to try and continue productizing it along that vector -- rather than simply living off the data feed it produces.
Is this a reason of fear for companies like Streak and Yesware who bet heavily on the Gmail extension? (Technically their market size would have been 500mn but since the largest player only has 326k users, the total addressable market becomes really small). Something seems off since YC itself has many companies that are following this model.
Anything I'm missing out here?
Even if those numbers were accurate, I don't think products like Rapportive/Streak/Yesware are limited at all by Gmail. If anything being in Gmail helps a ton with engagement. The reason the install numbers seem low is the same reason any startup may have low install numbers - their small, they need to perfect their product/distribution/sales/etc. I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that they are in gmail.
Whether or not Rapportive is limited by GMail is a good question. Getting 0.065% market penetration after 4 years would worry me, but doesn't mean they weren't making giant piles of cash. You could easily run a profitable business with 326k users even if only a tiny proportion are paying something. The important thing to take away from Rapportive's numbers is that a huge market doesn't automatically translate in to a huge market of available customers for your product. There might only be a tiny proportion who want what you're offering. Fortunately that doesn't actually matter if you can run your business profitably anyway.
I don't understand the pressure people feel they're under to sign up. Much like Google, you're the product.