
Announcing Clearbit Connect - uptown
http://blog.clearbit.com/clearbit-connect/
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maxpupmax
I'm one of the 7000 Connect beta users and would like to say that I'm very
happy with it.

Other commenters are comparing this to Rapportive. LinkedIn has discontinued
Rapportive and this is an excellent substitute.

So far the hit rate for finding emails has been about 80 - 85% in my
experience.

As an aside: I think Clearbit's building a really excellent suite of APIs, and
Connect is only the icing on the cake.

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niccolop
Has Rapportive been discontinued? It still works for me.

Or do you mean Linkedin no longer work on it?

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maxpupmax
Weird. It has never worked for me, and that seems to be the general consensus
on the review of the extension. I'm on Chrome/Mac OSX.

What os/browser are you using?

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niccolop
Chrome/OSX 10.11

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gailees
Does anyone else think it's scary that they are asking everyone on the
community plan to share all of their business contacts?
([https://www.dropbox.com/s/uuq96vivlbbrrak/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/uuq96vivlbbrrak/Screenshot%202016-04-07%2014.45.22.png?dl=0))

Definitely stopped me from signing up to give it a try.

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matznerd
So sign up for a paid plan? The plugin works well, and at least by being
upfront about utilizing your data, you know that there is a sustainable
business model behind it, so it will not have to be discontinued or put out to
pasture like Rapportive.

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oni0n56
I've been using the beta in my gmail for a while and the attention to detail
is so amazing.

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whatnotests
I built a similar tool back in 2010 - for gmail, yahoo mail and hotmail.

It was a browser plugin for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

I learned a lot about Gmail's DOM (it's highly obfuscated) and how terrible
the plugin-writer's experience is for Internet Explorer.

After six months of promotion on peoplesmart.com as an add-on to allow our
users to get more information about the people in their email conversations,
we had about twenty users total.

The project was scrapped, and I moved on to my next thing.

Perhaps it was just timing. Best of luck!

~~~
tyingq
They do provide a very natural way to do it for paid gmail accounts:
[https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets](https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets)

Not sure why there's no model to do this for standard gmail accounts.

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desireco42
I am one of beta users, Clearbit is really nice, it really helps me understand
and research companies. Not all of them are covered but when they are, it is
super useful.

Also, because they have Alex MacCaw on team, for whom I have great respect as
a developer, really makes me enjoy and like this product.

Only thing that I encountered as a problem is that privacy plugins tend to
disable it and mess with it running. I whitelisted it a little but it somewhat
helped, not completely.

Anyhow, really great product.

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natrius
A product people liked got shut down, so someone else rebuilt it. As a
society, we're needlessly duplicating so much effort because we've decided
treat software as a private good even though it's non-rivalrous and non-
excludable. If we can come up with better ways to fund software, we can end
this widespread waste and make progress faster.

~~~
cloudjacker
in the open source community, the same problem occurs the moment that the
steward rejects the pull request. So the altruist forks the project and
releases it again with a new name.

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tyingq
There's an api, and the pricing isn't cheap, but I feel like this is going to
bring a whole new wave of spam after the initially scraped list gets resold
over and over.

You might have an additional revenue stream selling an "opt my email out of
this thing" plan.

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samlinkl
Announcing Rapportive ... again.

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gk1
This will never be as useful as Rapportive without having LinkedIn as a data
source. And since LinkedIn owns Rapportive and is probably not keen to share
that data with a competitor, I don't see that happening any time soon.

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fblp
I have ran connect side by side with rapportive during the beta and have not
noticed any data gaps. There are other sources of data beyond linkedin.

