I hope this doesnt get shut down. Rapportive is one of the few things I use every day. LinkedIn kept CardMunch going so I hope they do the same with Rapportive.
Is that a market that LinkedIn want to compete in? I can see a tenuous link, but it doesn't seem to be part of their core business. I am sure that time will tell, but I suspect that they bought Rapportive for the talent.
Linkedin is completely embedded in my email experience, and they have Rapportive to thank for it. I suspect I'm not the only one, so it probably makes sense to keep the service running.
I didn't realise it was such a big deal. Any chance you could spell out what the key benefits are to you? I use LinkedIn to read up (i.e. spy) on people quite a bit if I am going to be working with them but I don't know why this would be useful for people who are already emailing me.
Sure. The key benefit in a nutshell: it makes context switching less painful.
I'm introduced by email to a lot of people I don't know - new and potential customers, new and potential partners, lots and lots of potential hires, etc. A fair number of these introductions evolve into two-way conversations. And, as probably everybody here, my overall dose of email is way too high.
The result of all this is constant context switching between too many mental threads. Rapportive makes each context switch slightly easier. In aggregate that saves me immense amounts of mental cycles.
I don't use Rapportive, but the idea that when I receive an e-mail it might tell me "you don't know this person, but your coworker Bob knows him from their old company together" (which is what LinkedIn generally provides) is compelling enough that if I used Gmail I'd be installing it right now.
