
Introducing the people widget - sorbus
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/introducing-people-widget.html
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mdwrigh2
Obviously this is competing at least somewhat with Rapportive. I wonder if
this will actually consume users of Rapportive because it's good enough, or if
it will boost Rapportive's coverage and use because of the competition.

If I were to make a guess, however, I'd guess this is "good enough" to steal a
large number of users from Rapportive, or rather people will just stop
installing the Rapportive add-on.

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ktsmith
I doubt they care if a single user is stolen from rapportive. There are a
massive number of gmail accounts and all of those people that have never heard
of rapportive will now have a new feature they may benefit from in some way.
For the small percentage of gmail users that have heard of rapportive and have
chosen not to use it for whatever reason (trust/security) we also may see some
rapportive like benefit. While this is clearly inspired by rapportive I can't
imagine the goal was to steal users from them.

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mdwrigh2
Oh, I don't think their intent was to steal users from Rapportive, I was just
speculating on how this feature would affect Rapportive.

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erikpukinskis
I think it's really stupid to announce this stuff before people can actually
use it. It's one thing to have a feature in your product. That's great. But if
no one uses it, it's worth way less. It's not helping your word of mouth, and
it's not helping people stick.

Google, Twitter, Facebook post stuff like this all the time, and I think "wow,
that's cool. I'd like to try that." And I fire up my mail, or my FB or my
tweets and it's not there. And I think "oh well, I'll see it eventually."

But I often don't. This happened last week, but I've forgotten entirely what
the feature was, which product it was, or even what company. One of those
three. They could've got me using the new feature, but now I may never
discover it.

Lost opportunity. Impotent press.

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hung
I love that the image has a status message saying "I'm hosting game night
tomorrow night" and that the message was posted "five days ago." How useful!

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estel
I guess this is a staged rollout, as I can't see it on any of my accounts?
(Including a corporate one)

Also, how does this affect the positioning of adverts that currently fill this
space?

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iaskwhy
From the article: "which is why over the next two weeks we’re rolling out a
new people widget located on the right hand side of your messages."

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estel
Thanks. That was superseded in my mind by "you can now see contextual
information".

