Image by 4nitsirk via Flickr
a new angel came down from web 2.0 heaven this week. a new social crm plugin for gmail provides a 360 view of people with whom you correspond. but is the full monty treatment appropriate for all your contacts? and what are people seeing about you? never heard of rapportive? well, they’ve heard of you, and they’re sharing that info with all your gmail contacts.
rapportive, a service that integrates with gmail, got fabulous writeups. the next web was among the first to trumpet the news: ” gmail gets a slick social crm tool. you’re going to like this.” “stop what you are doing and install this plugin,” gushed readwriteweb.com. and so on.
what’s social crm? in this case, it’s the ability to see what social channels one’s correspondents are using, along with information collected from those social channels. rapportive adds a widget to the gmail interface (click on image to see larger):
naked to the world
cool beans, yes? well, kind of. let’s take a closer look. rapportive found a pretty good picture of me on my linkedin profile. it found my birthdate somewhere or other and did the math – I don’t much care if people know how old I am, but the placement is a little prominent. I think the work history comes from linkedin, as well. trouble is, it’s not very current. to look at this, one would think I was still fighting the good fight to make a mortgage company look pretty. um, not since 2008.
the twitter handle? not me. the myspace account? not mine. hmm.
how do they know?
I tweeted my curiousity about where rapportive was getting its info and, more importantly, how I could correct it. I was impressed by how quickly rapportive’s founders got back to me through twitter and by email. the information, they told me, came primarily from a site called rapleaf.com. rapleaf appears to be some kind of scraper site on steroids. it searches up and down the lonely corridors of the interwebs looking for email address. my yahoo address was in my google profile, so apparently it looked for that, too. I secured [email protected] early on (a college nickname), and have been plagued since then by mail intended for every idiot in the universe with last name todd, first name starting with b, and an inability to correctly enter their email address. thus the bogus twitter and myspace. but I digress
there is no way to edit information in one’s rapleaf profile. cup half full? it offers a preview of what the private eye will turn up for your divorce trial. but overall, not a good situation. the guys at rapportive tell me they are working to bring editing to profiles. that’s good.
don’t use gmail or rapportive? you’re still in the crosshairs
the profile at right is for a professional contact. I was very surprised to see her age – she looks and acts far younger. I’m not going to visit her bebo profile or myspace page. but I could, and so could anyone who receives correspondence from her. what if the information is erroneous or incomplete, as on my profile? the millions of people who don’t use gmail or keep up with social networking stuff are unknowingly providing access to personal information.
what about those who are part of the social media set? skillful personal branders and the like? how will they deal with a social profile outside their control? is this how chris brogan wants to appear? no smoking guns, to be sure, but the new media labs twitter handle is at odds with his formidable personal brand. or jeff cutler? it’s no secret jeff drinks a bit, but surely he’s more than just a billboard for a brewery?
could be the best rapportive profile is no profile at all – here’s my dad’s and another friend’s (way to fly under the radar!)
especially after the recent furor over google’s buzz service, the absence of any contrary opinion about a service I see as far more intrusive and arbitrary is surprising.
what do you think? are you using rapportive?
note: research for this post was gathered by my amazing girlfriend and sleuth extraordinare alice hanes. if you want to find out about something (or someone), hire her.
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This is something new I have learnt, rapportive I really like it. Thanks for informing us, I think now everything is just simple.
Martin:
In case you’re too busy, here’s a note I just sent to uservoice:
You arrogant bastards. If I wanted everyone to know everything about me I would tell them. That’s my job, NOT YOURS.
What do I have to do to get out of your miserable, privacy-killing crosshairs? This is nothing short of an invasion of my privacy. You have not given me the chance to opt in. You had bloody well better give me this chance to OPT OUT.
Knock it off. NOW.
The next letter won’t be so kind.
=============
Your comment above — many people consider it to be sensitive personal information. Of course we want to treat it with the due respect.— is laughable. The only way to show respect is to ask if this information can be used.
You and your Googlemates may sit around thinking it’s swell to share everything with everybody in the world but I hate to throw cold water on your egofest but it ain’t so.
Get real. And get out of my life.
Rapportive seems fantastic, and they have a privacy policy now, so I’ll read through it and see what they do with my gmail.
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Hi there, just doing some research for my Hanes site. Amazing the amount of information on the web. Wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but nice site. Take care.
It must be the generation gap, but it is SO alarming that the majority of “Rapportees” and other “social” account users accept lack of privacy as the status quo. I don’t want to “beat them by joining them” — I want “opt out” engineering (and even that doesn’t seem to be a choice, in Rapportive’s case!) stopped — “opt out” should be illegal. Don’t tell me I “have a choice — not using internet at all.” That’s not a choice in the workplace or in this society. YOU should have the choice to “opt in,” if you’re keen on sharing details (accurate or not) about your lives.
I found this blog by googling, “how to block rapportive,” of which I was unaware until stumbling on the extension today. I didn’t find a solution. Yet. I’ve already had my credit card hijacked twice in the past three years (and not from my end of the ether, either!), and I’m not ready to unwittingly hand out personal info to any more mystery “secure sites” and hacker-yayhoos out there. Nor do I like feeling as though I’m living in a petri dish, microscopic power ever-increasing from 10x to…? Video cameras trained on us at every street corner, our medical records ripe for the government’s picking, our every purchase record put into a blender to define our “personalities” and “enhance our online experience,” personal mistakes in the past publicly dogging us to our graves… Maybe the solution is to gather up the minority and visit our State Attorney Generals and (sigh) Congressmen/Senators. Or to find some way to, “Wake up, people!” to what our world will be like ten years from now as we passively continue to let corporations and government and nefarious cretins mine every last detail of our lives; individuals reduced to faceless numbers, past freedoms withered to dust in our collective memory.
Thanks for your comment, Beth. although I'm a marketing guy by profession, personally I'm a pretty private guy. how do I reconcile the two? I figure if my preferences are out there and technology continues to march along, we'll come to a point where I will see mostly stuff I'm interested in seeing and get offers designed to push my specific buttons. I will see less things I don't care about and less time and effort will be wasted on both sides. do I care if the music site knows I like sufjan stevens? no indeed – it helps them recommend other stuff I might like.
I order stuff on the phone from local merchants with my credit card. I know that pizza guy is treating my financial data with far less care than amazon, but it's convenient. as far as I know, I have not had my financial information stolen. or the thieves are not making a lot of money from me.
rapportive gets a lot of its data from another company called rapleaf. if you google them, you will find that they are a lot more sketchy than rapportive, which has proven willing to make adjustments to give consumers more control over what gets displayed. go after rapleaf – not for collecting the data, but for having poor judgment in who they sell that data to. rapportive provides completely vanilla information from readily available sources. it helps me learn more about the people with whom I correspond – but not more than those people want to put out there.
Todd
The best way out is to install rapportive, and use it to edit the information people see on it. They now offer the ability to edit every information – image, professional history, social networks etc…everything apart from location. So the only way to beat 'em here is to join 'em!
thanks for the comment – I really like rapportive
todd,
found an important rapportive update alert in my gmail today which addresses my main gripe–that much of the profile data mined from the web is outdated or inaccurate…and uneditable. upgrades from rapportive now allow limited user profile management(eg name, photo and jobs) and soon users will have ability to edit location info and social networking sites linked to their email address. combined with google’s launch of it’s OAuth app platform, expanded user control should attract more gmail users. those using other mail clients would serve themselves well to ensure their own profiles are current too. rapportive has great potential as a gmail CRM add-on and improved user profile control will make it more reliable and valuable.
i do have a lingering question…rapportive was able to pick up my long forgotten flickr account. i found this disturbing since i recalled having made the account private and unsearchable. i double-checked my flickr settings to confirm and noted that my BACK-UP contact address for flickr listed my gmail account. as i never actively used this flickr accout, i am fortunate nothing too sensitive is exposed. i am somewhat concerned however that my “anonymous” flickr profile name is now publicly linked to my official gmail address/profile via rapportive’s data search.
any thoughts on how rapportive’s web-mining tools could override privacy settings on social media account? todd? martin?
all in all nice improvements from rapportive. the instructions for updating are clear and easy. and you guys are super-responsive–it is appreciated!
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Martin,
Thanks for making adjustments. As a guy who is the national social media trainer for the Society of Professional Journalists, it’s a little silly to be portrayed as a Twitterer with 44 followers. Having the ability to verify our accounts and profiles would be awesome.
Todd,
Nice column.
Jeff
thanks for your comment, jeff. think the issue might be related to multiple email addresses.
Todd,
I am using Rapportive with my Gmail account. I sent a test message from another account to my Gmail address to see what Rapportive says about me and I’m fine with it:
Paul Geffen
* Boston
* 55
* Marketing Director at Boston Wagner Society
* CEO/CTO at trovar.com
* @lpgeffen
* LinkedIn
* flickr
paul, thanks for writing in! I expect that for a lot of people, the information will be correct, as it is for you. my issue is a) with the fact that information cannot be edited and b) that a majority of people will not even know to check their rapportive profiles for accuracy. I believe that (a) will be remedied soon, but I am worried that (b) will remain an issue.
Something I forgot to mention in my last comment: we are planning to remove the person’s age from Rapportive soon, because we think that knowing someone’s age is not particularly useful, and many people consider it to be sensitive personal information. Of course we want to treat it with the due respect.
thank you martin for the quick reply. I agree that rapportive has the potential to be a highly useful service. the post actually started as a compare and contrast with the reception google buzz received not long ago. from my perspective, rapportive makes far greater assumptions about what information people want easily available for viewing. note I say “easily.” I understand that all the information shown is publicly available. to have that information consolidated and presented in another context, however, is potentially troubling. in addition, the potential for errors is a red flag. I noted in my post that my yahoo address is often used in error by others. so, for example, brynn todd sets up a twitter account “btodd1.” the address associated with the account is indeed my yahoo address. that’s probably why it has no tweets and only one or two followers – brynn never gets in to use it, and I have no reason to know it’s there. I use topify with my twitter account, so the email associated with it is a topify one. even though @btrandolph is on my google profile, facebook, blog etc, it is not associated with my gmail or yahoo mail accounts, which rapleaf seems to regard as its gold standard.
again, I am not too worried about my personal profile. I expect you guys will get the wrinkles fixed and I will be able to clean up my information. my concern is that rapportive profiles are generated for everyone in my gmail inbox, and that of every other gmail user. the vast majority of these individuals will be unaware of rapportive, let alone how to modify their profile. I foresee a huge backlash when non-users start getting teased about pictures on their myspace page or “enhanced” job titles on linked in – information they never expected to share with (potentially) every person with whom they correspond.
Todd, thank you for your thoughtful post. You’re absolutely right — we’re breaking new ground with Rapportive, and we didn’t know how people were going to feel about so much data being available. We were actually amazed that the response was so overwhelmingly positive.
We have thought long and hard about the privacy implications of what we are doing, and we have several founding principles:
– We only want to publish information that is already public (i.e. which you could find yourself by Googling for a few minutes — or by hiring Alice!).
– We want individuals to be in control of their own data.
– We want the information about people to be truthful, up-to-date and accurate, and not display anybody in a negative light.
I can’t say that our first version gets full marks on these criteria, but we are working very hard to make sure that we do soon. In particular, we will soon allow you to claim your own profile and edit it, and everybody who views it will then immediately see the data you provide. That way you can be sure that the information others see about you is accurate.
I hope that calms your fears, but if you have any concerns please contact us at uservoice AT rapportive.com. We read and try to respond to every single email.