Rapportive is awesome, and this'll make it even better. I just launched the search on HN for a cofounder a couple days ago, and I probably got around 150 emails all in response. Getting a picture, name, location, Twitter, and other details for nearly every email really helped make things more personal and easier to whittle down applicants without intensive googling. Great application.
Yup, the invite one. Not all were cofounders (probably half were people with advice), and probably half the response for cofounders were people that wouldn't work out due to location. But yes, it was an insane response.
You should write about your experience with that, I'm pretty sure that lots of people here would be interested to hear that and how it worked out for you.
Rapportive is YC? I had no fucking clue. I signed up in March with the other 10,000 (yes, 10,000) who did in their first 24 hours. (EDIT: I originally said 30K; their blog says it was merely 10K in first 24 hours. My bad.)
Yup, we suspect anecdotally that the percentage of email volume people receive from organisations - notifications or list mail - is much more than 10%. So adding this useful context to email from organisations should have a large impact.
I love this product. People have been talking "social email" for a long time.... But this is the first implementation that gives more than it distracts.
Wrt the new code that groks auto emails, I would love to see:
- seeing that a Twitter follow email is from Twitter doesn't do much for me. If it parsec the email and told me recent tweets from the follower? That would be awesome
- opening up this kind of support (email parsing) as plugins that could be crowd sourced would be great.
Hey there, refresh your Gmail tab and checkout a twitter follower notification :)
We do have an API to let folks write Rapportive applications, or Raplets. Checkout raplets.com for some examples. Here's a funky video of the MailChimp one: http://blip.tv/file/3859911
That's pretty handy. I had just turned off Rapportive because of how many people it was unable to find. It just wasn't very useful (given the types of people I regularly communicate with).
We find that the coverage varies a lot -- some users get a great experience, for others very little is found. We really want to improve that, and covering those 10% of emails which come from organisations is a first step.
Would this be sufficient to make you turn Rapportive on again? :)
I have had mixed results. For my corporate inbox it's not as useful (except to identify sales goons who are cold calling and to see who in my company has profiles on which social sites -- which can be very entertaining indeed!). For my personal inbox it works better but is less entertaining since I typically know everyone I'm corresponding with and already follow the twitterers, etc.
What I'd like to see is some enhancement in the area of CRMness similar to what http://noteleaf.com/ provides, notably the tasks/alerts feature.
To answer your question, though, yes, I am going to turn it back on. :)
Awesome work with company info. But instead of looking up the home page I feel it may be more relevant to look up the about pages. For example for orders@dynadot.com Rapportive tells me:
> Extends your domain by one year.
Time remaining on your domain will be added.
*Except .eu and .be. 3GB of bandwidth and 30MB of space.
Applies to new domain registrations only.
which happens to be the current offer for domain transfers on the Dynadot home page. I would prefer to see some info from the about page[1] though:
> Dynadot is an ICANN accredited domain name registrar and web host
located in San Mateo, California...
Nearly all of my emails are from real people... that is, the ones that get past GMail's spam filter, which is the only subset I care about.
I pretty aggressively mark as spam any auto-emails. Pretty much the only company I won't do this to is Amazon, not because I don't want to, but because I am scared to.
