With competition from Google’s own People Widget breathing down its neck, startupRapportiveis innovating fast to keep itsGmail pluginin the lead.
Rapportive replaces the right-hand bar of Gmail with information about the people who email you. Tweets, LinkedIn information and other social data is displayed, helping to provide a little more context to the messages you receive. We recentlycoveredthe company’s addition of the ability to reply to tweets and follow people on Twitter right from Gmail, and now Rapportive is extending its service beyond just received emails to ones you’re sending too.
Once you’ve filled in an email address in the ‘To’ field, Rapportive will look up information about that person. While this might seem like a small change, it’s potentially very useful indeed. Being able to see a person’s latest tweets may give you information about whether now is a good time to contact them, or perhaps it will give you a good opening to your email: “I saw you’re in London today, how’s it going?”. If you haven’t contacted the person in a while, LinkedIn data might tell you that they’ve changed jobs – again, very useful to know to make sure what you send is a valuable as possible.
The actual data you get for each person depends on what Rapportive has in its database, but when it’s good, it’sverygood. The new feature is being rolled out to existing users gradually, or you can force an upgrade by visitingthis link.
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Story byMartin SFP Bryant
Martin SFP Bryant is the founder of UK startup newsletter PreSeed Now and technology and media consultancy Big Revolution. He was previously(show all)Martin SFP Bryant is the founder of UK startup newsletterPreSeed Nowand technology and media consultancyBig Revolution. He was previously Editor-in-Chief at TNW.
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