The Red Ferret Journal

Rapportive is a very cool web browser plugin which adds a sidebar full of social networking info to Gmail. The clever bit is it only kicks in when you access a message, at which point it goes off to search for social network information relating to the sender. You get immediate access to their Twitter feed embedded in the sidebar, and direct access to their Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace pages if available. Wowee, instant stalking…

There’s also space to add your own notes, CRM style, to the sidebar, which could be very useful for your everyday email relationships (A+++ nice guy, would buy again etc). Definitely worth a look. Unfortunately I can’t see the product being very long lived, because it achieves all this by replacing Google ads in your inbox, but we’ll see how it goes with the mighty G.

 We get most of our social network data from a company called Rapleaf, so if you want to improve the data we show about you right now, you can sign up at http://rapleaf.com with your main email address and edit your details there. This will take a while to be reflected in our system. We’re planning in the future to accept corrections directly, both to other people’s data and to your own. We’re still figuring out the best way to do that.