One of the coolest things that Google unveiled this week at Google I/O, at least in my opinion, is Gmail contextual gadgets. I’ll skip the small talk and get straight to the point. This is huge. Beyond huge. The capability of these gadgets to interact with your email data is amazing.
One of my biggest desires is to make my address book and email communications more social. I am somewhat obsessed with connections and being able to connect to and contact people in a variety of ways. That’s why I really wish that someone would make a plugin for Apple’s Mail and Address Book applications that adds these kinds of hooks. So when I found out about Gmail contextual gadgets, I quickly searched through for anything that would add a social layer to my email communications. I found Rapportive.
Rapportive is a really cool gadget that adds a right-hand sidebar to Gmail and searches the currently viewed (or selected) message for any and all email addresses in it. It then searches the web for any social network profiles that are linked to that email address and displays links to those profiles. It also tries to parse out information on that person such as a profile picture (not sure where this comes from, my picture is an older one that I don’t use on any of my profiles), job (LinkedIn), location (could come from several places), and possibly more (that’s all I’ve seen so far in my limited use). Rapportive also offers the ability to include various ‘raplets’, or plugins, to the interface to include extra information that isn’t provided by default. Five services are highlighted, mostly CRM and business-related, and there is the option to add other raplets from a URL.
Unfortunatley I don’t use the web interface for any of my email very often, since I’m usually with either my laptop or my iPhone, and I can get my email in the Mail applications on both. But if more and more useful gadgets start popping up, I may consider switching.