

Write better emails with the Rapportive sidebar - samstokes
http://blog.rapportive.com/rapportive-on-compose

======
pbiggar
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.

~~~
corin_
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.

~~~
pbiggar
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.

------
kalvin
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

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

~~~
samstokes
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...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/introducing-people-widget.html)

[2] [http://blog.rapportive.com/rapportive-integrates-gmail-
peopl...](http://blog.rapportive.com/rapportive-integrates-gmail-people-
widget)

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

------
Hisoka
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?

~~~
dmbass
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.

