Rapportive: Get details of your Gmail contacts from various sources

Social networks have really captured a lot of attention for many people to stay in touch with each other. Email still remains the most important way to pass confidential and personal information. I mean we cannot discuss a business proposal over Facebook or Orkut can we! 😛

Most people use their email address to register to social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Linked in. Rapportive is a awesome online tool which shows relative information corresponding to the email id. (see image below)

As you see in the image above, with my email id you can see links to my Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, hi5, Blogger and Flickr profile.

Features of Rapportive

• Rapportive needs to be installed on the browser as a addon with Firefox or an extension with Chrome.
• Rapportive works with Gmail and when I opened a message it search for information about that email address and displays it on the right hand column where usually Gmail displays sponsored links. I have never ever clicked on these links through Gmail so for me this is a great use of space on Gmail’s layout. 😉
• Another feature I liked is I could leave notes about the email addresses which is very useful. Sometimes we need to remember certain things about someone we send an email.

There are many add-ons around which can change the way Gmail layout is or can even give added information on Gmail itself. But Rapportive will probably change the way I look at email ids for sometime. Use Rapportive on a Gmail account which you use professionally and to which you get a lot of emails from a lot of different people.

Try out Rapportive and do let me know your views on it or even share any similar internet service. Do drop in your comments.