

LinkedIn Neutered Rapportive Today - welder
http://ahamlett.com/blog.html#linkedin-neutered-rapportive-today

======
notlisted
I have another theory... It's served its purpose and people are onto them...

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.

~~~
codezero
I deleted contacts from the site that I apparently imported in 2006, first, it
was nearly impossible to find the page that allows you to delete them, and
second, they are still showing up as suggestions with the reason of "you
imported this contact."

They really are gobbling up everything they can, and even if they say they are
removing stuff, they never will.

------
jasonkester
I bet one could make a successful business by just noticing aqcuisitions as
they happen and immediately starting work to clone the acquired product
exactly. This pattern of shutting down the acquired service and leaving all
their users hanging is so common that it seems like it should be easy to
capitalize on.

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.

~~~
asuffield
You could do much the same thing looking at startups which are 2 years old.
The post-acquisition survival rate of a product is not that much better than
the pre-acquisition survival rate - getting bought by a larger company does
not mean that they won't eventually decide the same thing you would have found
on your own: the product does not bring in enough money to pay for itself.

Acquisitions are a risky investment. You buy a company and it might turn out
to be worthless.

------
kylelibra
The post offers Full Contact
([http://www.fullcontact.com/](http://www.fullcontact.com/)) and Vibe
([http://vibeapp.co/](http://vibeapp.co/)) as alternatives. Does anyone have
any other recommendations?

~~~
welder
[https://ark.com/mail](https://ark.com/mail)

[http://www.connect6.com/Home/ChromeExtensionDetail](http://www.connect6.com/Home/ChromeExtensionDetail)

[http://falcon.io/](http://falcon.io/)
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/falcon/fcbcnboheai...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/falcon/fcbcnboheaijdfnkchlbeilgmaebdogd))

~~~
walterbell
Are these plugins sending every visited web page to their servers, or is this
done when the user clicks/hovers on a name/profile?

~~~
rarjunpillai
I can't talk about others. I'm the founder of Vibe. We take privacy very
seriously. We don't read anything more than we should. All we do is 'mark' the
emails right in your inbox/page. When you hover/click an email, we send just
that email to the server and returns the data,

------
mbesto
Curious, is there an API that I can send an email string to and get all of
their social profiles listed? For example, I put in mike@gmail.com and get
facebook.com/mike, twitter.com/mikeguy1, etc

EDIT: Looks like FullContact does this:
[http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/person/](http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/person/)

~~~
priley
Every one of our customers who has access to our API demonstrates that the Ark
(YC W12) API has much more data than FullContact's API. Send me an email and
I'll hook you up.

~~~
lloyddobbler
Kipp from FullContact here. Interestingly, we've had several customers put us
head-to-head against Ark in match tests using the same source data sets, and
all have wound up going with us due to much higher match rates & better data
returned.

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.)

------
s4sharpie
Obviously, there are many reasons behind why LinkedIn took this decision (and
indeed made the original purchase decision) and they may be using the
technology internally at LinkedIn in other ways. And, I am a fan of LinkedIn
and use it everyday.

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.

~~~
johndavi
The original purchase decision I find fantastically brilliant -- and I hate
that word.

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.

------
alooPotato
Founder of Streak here - we've actually thought of adding this functionality
to Streak but as others have mentioned the hard part is finding a good data
source. Give our current infrastructure, we could build a rapportive
replacement pretty quick if we could find a good partner on the data side....

------
roh26it
Gmail has ~500mn users. Rapportive is possibly the most used Gmail extension
out there for Chrome & Firefox. By deduction, Rapportive is the largest
business/product built on top of Gmail. With only 326,000 active users isn't
it a worry that products on top of Gmail are difficult to market?

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?

~~~
alooPotato
Founder of Streak here, we aren't too worried that Rapportive _only_ had 326K
users. First that number is a pretty low estimate. Thats their current
_active_ weekly users. This is after they let their product die slowly after a
few years. This also doesn't count all the installs that didn't use to be from
the chrome webstore nor does it count safari and IE.

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.

~~~
onion2k
The fact a user might have installed from somewhere other than the webstore,
or if they're on Safari or IE, is entirely irrelevant - the 326k is _active_
users, eg people who have accessed the Rapportive API in the last week. That's
_everyone_ using Rapportive regardless of where they installed from or which
browser they're in.

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.

------
jwcrux
It looks like only the front end has changed. I have a Python library
(github.com/jordan-wright/rapportive) that directly calls the backend API, and
it still works fine.

------
harkyns_castle
Its beyond me why anyone would want to sign up for Linked In, let alone have
them trawl your contacts etc.

I don't understand the pressure people feel they're under to sign up. Much
like Google, you're the product.

------
roh26it
It still shows all the user profiles to me. Has this been rolled out only to
selective groups?

------
rubyrescue
326k users? that's... shockingly low

~~~
codezero
Think about it this way, 326k users who've handed over their address books and
every incoming/outgoing email address they've used. Their power/value isn't in
their users, but their corpus of identities.

------
pcl
I dunno... I've literally never used any of those buttons, and the new deeper
LinkedIn stuff they expose seems useful.

------
volandovengo
Still works for me...

~~~
AdamN
me too, but I'm in Kenya. Maybe they just did US users first?

