Write better emails with the Rapportive sidebar | Hacker News Reader

Write better emails with the Rapportive sidebar

blog.rapportive.com

55 pointssamstokes10 comments

I have to say, Rapportive is the biggest change to my emailing experience since I got Gmail, and it's due to this sidebar.

The major difference is that I can see the face of the other person (this works maybe 80% of the time). In practically ever use case I have for email, showing me the other perons's face helps me out, whether I've met the person or not.

- open source mailing lists become more human (and improves the aggressive arguing that can often occur there)

- I "put a name to a face" for professional colleagues

- I know something about people who email me out of the blue (VCs, founders who want something, coders with patches or queries about an OSS project)

- makes my emails to others more human

I encourage anybody who is technical and uses email to use Rapportive.

I'm sure it's different for different people, so not trying to suggest your view is wrong, but: I really don't see how that can help. People I know, I don't need a reminder of what they look like. People I don't, I don't see how seeing their face is useful. As to their latest updates and information from LinkedIn/Twitter/etc, if I care, I'm already connected with them and in-the-know, if not... then I don't want to see it in my email.

I will occasionally care about their twitter/etc, but mostly it's the person's picture that matters.

I guess it's hard to describe because it's a _feeling_, but it feels like I'm communicating with a person, rather than some kind of email sending robot. This wasn't the reason I started using it, so it kinda surprised me at how much of a difference this makes to my communication.

I'm not sure why it's not useful to you - one possible reason is that you're already very good at empathizing with the person at the other end of your email (not being sarcastic).

Another thing which surprises me is that the picture doesn't matter - old/young/geeky/cool/black/white/male/female don't really convey any useful information to my response, but it just kinda feels like I know this person in some way, and want to treat them better.

This was by far the biggest missing feature from Rapportive, which is already one of very few free services I'd pay for.

In addition to just seeing the sender's photos, LinkedIn title, recent tweets (hover to see whole thread), etc. in the sidebar, if you hover over any email address inside the email (e.g., anyone cc'ed) it'll instantly display the information for that person as well.

I don't ever keep Twitter open (maybe I'm in the minority here) so even if you only email friends, it's nice to see what they've been tweeting when replying to their email. But if you often have people you don't know showing up in your gmail, it's a must-have

Gmails upcoming update looks to replicate Rapportive. cue discussion of founding a company on a missing feature.

If you're referring to the Gmail People Widget [1], we don't think it replicates us: we provide a lot more information on your contacts, and we allow you to interact with your contacts on social networks. It certainly does complement us (and compliment us!), so we integrated with it. [2]

As for "founding a company on a missing feature": we think it's a pretty important missing feature, but more to the point, what we do now is the free leg of a freemium business model. We have premium features launching soon that we're really excited about, and which Google isn't going to build.

[1] http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/introducing-people-wid...

[2] http://blog.rapportive.com/rapportive-integrates-gmail-peopl...

And this is why I love HN. Thanks for the writeup :) I have rapportive for a few years and love it!

Who would use something like this? Whats the common use case? How does the app know what email to map to what linked, twitter profile etc?

I believe that would be someone who emails a lot of different people that they are not familiar with but wants to appear familiar with the recipient's activity on twitter while using the Gmail web client.

It essentially looks up the contact on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, and shows your a short profile about them. Handy if someone you don't know emails you out of nowhere.

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