

Rapportive - making excellent service scale - niravs
http://rapportive.com/

======
jayair
I think their lander is a good example for developers who need some help
designing their landers.

Just focus on two key things.

1\. Understand the purpose of your page and try to do the least possible. Ex:
explain what the product does or create hype, ease of sign up or show benefits
of product etc. 2\. Reduce the noise on the page so you can accomplish it
well. Do this by either increasing contrast for the interface elements or
reducing the number of elements.

Too often people get caught up in making it pretty. So their priorities end up
looking like:

1\. Lets make it pretty 2\. Tell them everything about our product

And so for a lot of developers doing design they fail at the first step and
ultimately end up with a poorly designed page that is crammed with info.

Take some pointers from these guys and when in doubt "show less".

~~~
romland
Call me silly for running NoScript in this day and age of Javascript on every
page but it's not often that I get a moment of "WTF" when visiting a site.

This one gave me just that. Took me a scroll down the page, then up again,
then halfway towards pressing backspace... Then I remembered! Whitelist
NoScript temporarily!

Normally this comes pretty naturally to me because I can easily spot that a
site is depending on Javascript or not.

So my mileage varied.

~~~
jayair
I'll be honest with you, I wasn't really thinking about the NoScript case when
writing the post.

I'm not sure if NoScript has a way of telling you that you might be missing
something on the page. Kinda like how Click2Flash tells me if it is a sIFR.
That would seem useful for minimal landers like these ones.

~~~
weaksauce
They should add a <noscript> tag to the page and say "Hey you should be using
javascript if you want to see this page."

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abossy
Their website is beautiful; simple, elegant and tells me enough about what
they do for me to want to install their plugin. I wish more companies could
present their products so concisely.

~~~
skmurphy
I would like to know more about the folks who will be reading my mail. An
about page with some real background to let folks know who is behind the
company seems mandatory to me. Also, this is a service I would want to pay
for, free scares me when it comes to giving someone access to my e-mail.

------
volomike
I see problems where others seem happy about it.

\- Security. They appear to be receiving my email address and those I interact
with. I wonder how long they store that. I wonder how securely they encrypt
that in their database, or if they don't encrypt that at all. Do they submit
to annual security audits with that valuable information? Is any of that
information subject to USA government security audit laws like Sarbanes-Oxley?

\- Do a whois on them and you get a DomainsByProxy thing. That doesn't give
one a warm fuzzy feeling, security-wise.

\- The Notes area at the bottom -- does that mean that someone can write
something malicious about me and everyone who receives an email from me, who
has Rapportive installed, can see that message? Or, is that just a personal,
private notes area just for me and no one else? If it's a public thing, then
wow -- I have a serious problem with that.

~~~
rahulvohra
Currently, only you can see your notes. In the future, we want to allow
sharing across teams and integration with CRMs.

~~~
ekanes
"Notes" is a great idea, but storing them anywhere but locally raises the
probability that they could leak, which would be disastrous for your users and
possibly fatal for your startup. Good luck with the product though, neat
stuff.

------
kljensen
Nothing mentioned about privacy of my email...otherwise ubercool

~~~
rahulvohra
This was actually a website we prepared for investors; we weren't intending a
public beta today! But the press found it, and so here we are. That's why you
can't see a privacy policy.

In the absence of a written policy, we'll "treat users right" which roughly
means we'll "treat users how we ourselves would want to be treated".

That's not particularly computable, so: the bodies of user's emails never
leave the browser. We find email addresses in the browser, and send those back
to our server to lookup. The emails themselves never touch our server.

~~~
extension
Perhaps you are already planning this, but I feel that an app of this nature
needs to go beyond the usual fine print privacy policy and give a front and
center explanation of what it's doing. You could portray this as a feature
description rather than a warning, as long as it's crystal clear.

That said, nifty idea. I'd like to see more website extensions like this, if
there was a better security model.

~~~
martinkl
Yes, we're planning to be very transparent about what we do. At the moment
it's really just a matter of staying on top of all of the unexpected press!

Our users' trust is absolutely crucial to what we're doing, so you can expect
detailed information on exactly what we do with your private data; and we may
also make some things opt-in/opt-out. We have no intention of hiding anything.

------
jaredhansen
This is fantastic - works well so far and is overall beautiful. If I were you
guys though, I'd be a little worried that google is going to kill it because
it replaces the ads in gmail, which are the revenue producers. Is there a plan
in place for what happens when google starts to get annoyed about that?

~~~
staunch
It seems to me that the guy who controls the plugin would win a technical
engagement. Legally they're safe too, I would imagine. If it becomes popular I
guess Google is just going to have to buy them!

------
hiroprot
Kinda remind me of Gnome Dashboard:

<http://nat.org/dashboard/>

Ah, those were the days ;)

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davidmurphy
So it basically covers up Google's ads in Gmail? No thanks. I get a great
product for free from Google and I want them to benefit by selling ads that I
see.

~~~
barrkel
Frankly, that's a bizarre rationale. Either the ads are useful to you or
they're not. If they're useful, you'll want to see them irrelevant of how they
benefit Google. If they're not useful, it's like saying you're glad public
transport is crap because it's cheap.

~~~
jfarmer
Yes. I know personally I have never clicked on an ad in gmail. They're always
for totally bizarre things.

For example, the last Fandango email I got served up a bunch of ads for
roofing companies. See Alice in Wonderland and get my crawl space sealed! I
guess...

Anyhow, Google wouldn't lose one red cent if I covered those ads up since they
make money on a CPC (vs. CPM) basis.

------
coffeemug
How do I uninstall it on Chrome and OS X? I can't find a way to do it. My main
pet peeve right now is that once Rapportive loads, I can no longer unlabel an
e-mail by clicking a little 'x' next to the label. (Yeah, it's relatively
minor, but breaking host functionality isn't nice :D)

~~~
martinkl
Sorry to hear about that bug -- we will look into it. For now, you can disable
Rapportive by choosing Window -> Extensions from the menu, and clicking the
'disable' link on Rapportive.

------
hiroprot
Wow:

"Sorry — currently we only support Chrome and Firefox. We will support more
browsers soon (the next is probably Internet Explorer)."

No Safari? And it's not next on the list? That's a bit odd, given that they
support Chrome.

~~~
rahulvohra
We are actually fully compatible with Safari already; we just haven't yet got
round to releasing a little Mac OS app that always runs our JS on
mail.google.com.

You can use the following bookmarklet in Safari to get Rapportive:
<http://rapportive.com/extensions/safari/bookmarklet.js>

The downside is that you have to manually start it in your Gmail tab. The
upside is that most peoples' Gmail tabs are very long lived and, hey, it works
in Safari :)

~~~
hiroprot
That's awesome, thanks.

Unfortunately, I can't get it to work :(

~~~
rahulvohra
Ah, I messed up. Can you try it again?

------
jamesmcintyre
just sent this email to the rapportive team (I'm guessing rahulvohra will be
the first/only to respond since he's "on top" of this HN thread):

\-----

When "mail.google.com" loads (the "inbox view") the emails from people in my
crm/social networks should be "glowing" or "jumping out at me". I LOVE your
guys' product as is, but won't you really be maximizing efficacy by splitting
the inbox into two "virtual" inboxes: one being messages to me from outside my
crm/social network and two being those messages from people already in my
crm/social network.

If you add this feature, not only will you meet your desired target demo use
case but open yourself to the use case for average consumers who would like to
only see gmail emails from facebook friends (and ignore the rest, aka SPAM).
In this case I'd recommend your web app living a "dual-brand" life and branch
development (if i had to guess this would double your odds of being acquired
by Google, Google know's email's on it's last leg so if your app can bridge
the old to the new (Google Wave) for both consumers and business users than
whats a few hundred million to nab them up? lol)

Good luck! Thanks for rapportive!

\-----

Do you guys agree? (that the "inbox view" would be the "killer feature" of
this app)

------
Locke1689
Very cool -- I'd just be worried about the companies switching APIs on you. If
you're prepared for that then more power to you. Or maybe you're just scraping
the sites themselves and blobbing them over to the side? I guess my technical
understanding of how it works is a little fuzzy.

~~~
abossy
Part of making an API publicly consumable is an informal commitment to
maintain it. Most major API changes are announced far in advance, and legacy
versions are maintained to give developers the chance to switch. A company
whose core value depends on consuming that API will likely be informed about
future changes; I'd think it's the least of their worries.

------
muon
For me it mixes up the identities. Looks like it fetches data based on Name
rather than email id.

------
zaidf
"We're currently searching for this address. Please check back shortly and we
should know more."

Do you guys scan through all the emails at once or will I see that every time
I open a new recipients email?

~~~
rahulvohra
We search on-demand currently. A search will start the first time you open an
email from an address we don't know about. Searches can take about a day right
now.

~~~
zaidf
_Searches can take about a day right now._

WOAH:\ Hope you guys can trim that down soon. At the minimum, you might want
to state an approximate time on the right. I kept going back at the screen for
10-15m hoping it'd be done.

~~~
rahulvohra
Re: approximate time remaining - good idea!

------
zaatar
No mention of whether they support Google Apps hosted email too. That would be
cool to have on top of just Gmail.

~~~
rahulvohra
The most seamless way to get Rapportive working on Google Apps is to make your
Google Apps email a Google Account and give it the same password. You can do
that here: <https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount>

We want to make this experience better :)

------
brandnewlow
This is sick. Good work. You took something I use all the time, every day, and
made it better. Thanks.

------
jarsj
great landing page. I am inspired.

------
tzury
installed it and played with it few minutes. 2 questions: 1\. why can't I
delete notes? 2\. are you calling the ability of adding notes to a contact
CRM?

~~~
martinkl
Notes in themselves are only barely CRM, but we plan to allow you to share
them with your team. And that's about as much as Highrise allows you to do!
(Ok, there are also tasks, deals, cases etc. but who actually uses those?)

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jasonlbaptiste
wow, well done. Seriously, i am now a user for life and id probably pay you
for stuff. Not sure what yet, but you'll figure that out :-).

------
urlwolf
really like it, but it's not compatible with another chrome extension I like,
better gmail.

~~~
rahulvohra
Try unchecking the "Remove Ads. Fix Page width. Reposition print button."
setting in Better Gmail. Does that help?

------
dustingetz
i would pay a small fee to legitimize our relationship so i can trust you
more.

