6 ms·

LinkedIn Neutered Rapportive Today

144 points by welder 12y ago

kylelibra 12y ago
The post offers Full Contact (http://www.fullcontact.com/ http://www.fullcontact.com/) and Vibe (http://vibeapp.co/ http://vibeapp.co/) as alternatives. Does anyone have any other recommendations?
- welder 12y ago
  https://ark.com/mail https://ark.com/mail http://www.connect6.com/Home/ChromeExtensionDetail http://www.connect6.com/Home/ChromeExtensionDetail http://falcon.io/ http://falcon.io/ (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/falcon/fcbcnboheaijdfnkchlbeilgmaebdogd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/falcon/fcbcnboheai...)
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Are these plugins sending every visited web page to their servers, or is this done when the user clicks/hovers on a name/profile?
    - rarjunpillai 12y ago
      I can't talk about others. I'm the founder of Vibe. We take privacy very seriously. We don't read anything more than we should. All we do is 'mark' the emails right in your inbox/page. When you hover/click an email, we send just that email to the server and returns the data,
  - priley 12y ago
    Vibe just uses FullContact (see their FAQ) who's data is pretty incomplete. Connect6 uses LeadFerret to power their plugin, which is even worse.
    - rarjunpillai 12y ago
      Hey Priley, Vibe uses FullContact. However, it is not just FC. We have other sources, our own crawlers and APIs as well. This is why we are steadily getting improvement in our data. PS: I'm the founder of Vibe.
- jeremi23 12y ago
  Collabspot (http://www.collabspot.com http://www.collabspot.com) is also doing this. It is using the data from fullcontact as well that is not as good as the one from rapportive. Collabspot's focus is more on showing/editing your CRM data (salesforce, sugarcrm, highrise) than public info. Disclaimer: i am the founder.
- welder 12y ago
  This looks almost exactly like Rapportive: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rapporto/lobacefbncbcpbneaggicmoahbikkohg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rapporto/lobacefbn...
rubyrescue 12y ago
326k users? that's... shockingly low
- wwwwwwwwww 12y ago
  yeah, definitely not very web scale!
- welder 12y ago
  That number is active Chrome+Firefox extension users, but Rapportive says they serve over 25 req per second from those users: https://success.heroku.com/rapportive https://success.heroku.com/rapportive
- codezero 12y ago
  Think about it this way, 326k users who've handed over their address books and every incoming/outgoing email address they've used. Their power/value isn't in their users, but their corpus of identities.
s4sharpie 12y ago
Obviously, there are many reasons behind why LinkedIn took this decision (and indeed made the original purchase decision) and they may be using the technology internally at LinkedIn in other ways. And, I am a fan of LinkedIn and use it everyday. Having said that, I am baffled by this. While I appreciate that there is a battle own an individual's primary social network and spend more time/content on LinkedIn vs say Facebook. But, IMHO, wouldn't it have been more prudent to build up the functionality of the LinkedIn component while still offering the functionality that 300k plus users obviously wanted anyway? While this will probably be re-offered (it now looks that it is) as a LinkedIn only plugin, LinkedIn are limiting their reach to only LinkedIn users. Had they continued to build the multi-network capabilities and brought the marketing/reach of LinkedIn to the product, I dare say they could have owned a significant portion of all GMail users and likely been no.1 in the space. Controlling that (and offering preferential treatment to LinkedIn) what definitely add value. Who knows the end result, but it looks like a missed opportunity that someone else will come in and take.
- johndavi 12y ago
  The original purchase decision I find fantastically brilliant -- and I hate that word. When LI bought Rapportive they bought access to my entire actual social/contact graph, whether I wanted them to have it or not. I've never done the "upload your contacts so we can spam them" on LinkedIn, but because of Rapportive: every one I email, and everyone who emails me, LI knows about. They know the frequency of my interaction, all in exchange for giving me a bit of information about the people who write me. They must have reached a point where either they have mined it sufficiently (and new installs are low) to not worry anymore about crippling it, and/or they realize that the bulk of the data that users care about is the LI data anyway (true for me), and they'd like to try and continue productizing it along that vector -- rather than simply living off the data feed it produces.
mbesto 12y ago
Curious, is there an API that I can send an email string to and get all of their social profiles listed? For example, I put in mike@gmail.com and get facebook.com/mike, twitter.com/mikeguy1, etc EDIT: Looks like FullContact does this: http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/person/ http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/person/
- priley 12y ago
  Every one of our customers who has access to our API demonstrates that the Ark (YC W12) API has much more data than FullContact's API. Send me an email and I'll hook you up.
  - mbesto 12y ago
    Cool, thanks! I just requested beta invite on your website but didn't see your contact details (mine are in my profile).
  - lloyddobbler 12y ago
    Kipp from FullContact here. Interestingly, we've had several customers put us head-to-head against Ark in match tests using the same source data sets, and all have wound up going with us due to much higher match rates & better data returned. We always encourage potential customers to try other services. With over 500 paying customers of the FullContact API from some of the internet's largest SaaS providers, we're pretty confident in the quality and quantity of our data. Bottom line is, none of us will have the same amount of data as Rapportive, because Rapportive had direct access to LinkedIn's data warehouse. (And as we all know, LinkedIn has never been shy about hoovering up data from anywhere it can get it.)
- zefi 12y ago
  Check out Stacklead they do exactly this - YC W14
volandovengo 12y ago
Still works for me...
- AdamN 12y ago
  me too, but I'm in Kenya. Maybe they just did US users first?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
notlisted 12y ago
I have another theory... It's served its purpose and people are onto them... Let me explain. A while back 'friends' started popping up in my suggestions list. I noticed that many of these were 'private' email addresses, ie email addresses i've used to sign up for a service, and were used only there, and nowhere else. I do not use these addresses to send email, they're only used to receive emails (newsletters etc). When i approached linkedin about this, they claimed i'd given them permission to access my gmail contacts on the mobile app. When i asked them for an exact date, they could not provide me with one, but responded with inStructions on how to remove these contacts. I'm 99% sure that i have never done so, i'm very very careful about this (manage a list of 15k+ members of an organization i run). The answer also did not make sense, because many of these suggested contacts should not show up in my gmail address book (receive-only, no interaction). My theory is that they've used the rapportive lookups to build a database of email addresses checked by my rapportive addon whenever i happen to click on an address in my inbox. If you search online, you'll find many people complaining about linkedin 'inviting' contacts without the initiative being taken by the user, and others who wonder how linkedin knew that they were acquainted with some of the suggested contacts. I must admit i have not bothered to gather conclusive proof of this, but like i said, many of the suggested contacts were single-use (generated on the fly on my own domain, anyone not found is forwarded to my admin account). I have disabled the rapportive addon after their response because i no longer trust it. Did miss it for a while, but with the changes outlined in this article, that's no longer an issue either. Ps i was one of the first 150k members of linkedin. Used to think they were the only decent social network in town. This trust has been lost forever. Guess that's hat happens when you go public. Growth required at all costs.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- codezero 12y ago
  I deleted contacts from the site that I apparently imported in 2006, first, it was nearly impossible to find the page that allows you to delete them, and second, they are still showing up as suggestions with the reason of "you imported this contact." They really are gobbling up everything they can, and even if they say they are removing stuff, they never will.
jwcrux 12y ago
It looks like only the front end has changed. I have a Python library (github.com/jordan-wright/rapportive) that directly calls the backend API, and it still works fine.
pcl 12y ago
I dunno... I've literally never used any of those buttons, and the new deeper LinkedIn stuff they expose seems useful.
jasonkester 12y ago
I bet one could make a successful business by just noticing aqcuisitions as they happen and immediately starting work to clone the acquired product exactly. This pattern of shutting down the acquired service and leaving all their users hanging is so common that it seems like it should be easy to capitalize on. In this case, you would have had two years to see this coming (and if you check out the comment thread from when the acquisition happened, you'll notice that everybody did see it coming) and do the rather straightforward development work to get a new version up and running. Then all you'd need do is drop a link in this thread right here today to your feature-wise Rapportive clone that actually still works as advertised, and you'd have 326,000 new customers tomorrow.
- asuffield 12y ago
  You could do much the same thing looking at startups which are 2 years old. The post-acquisition survival rate of a product is not that much better than the pre-acquisition survival rate - getting bought by a larger company does not mean that they won't eventually decide the same thing you would have found on your own: the product does not bring in enough money to pay for itself. Acquisitions are a risky investment. You buy a company and it might turn out to be worthless.
roh26it 12y ago
It still shows all the user profiles to me. Has this been rolled out only to selective groups?
roh26it 12y ago
Gmail has ~500mn users. Rapportive is possibly the most used Gmail extension out there for Chrome & Firefox. By deduction, Rapportive is the largest business/product built on top of Gmail. With only 326,000 active users isn't it a worry that products on top of Gmail are difficult to market? Is this a reason of fear for companies like Streak and Yesware who bet heavily on the Gmail extension? (Technically their market size would have been 500mn but since the largest player only has 326k users, the total addressable market becomes really small). Something seems off since YC itself has many companies that are following this model. Anything I'm missing out here?
- alooPotato 12y ago
  Founder of Streak here, we aren't too worried that Rapportive only had 326K users. First that number is a pretty low estimate. Thats their current active weekly users. This is after they let their product die slowly after a few years. This also doesn't count all the installs that didn't use to be from the chrome webstore nor does it count safari and IE. Even if those numbers were accurate, I don't think products like Rapportive/Streak/Yesware are limited at all by Gmail. If anything being in Gmail helps a ton with engagement. The reason the install numbers seem low is the same reason any startup may have low install numbers - their small, they need to perfect their product/distribution/sales/etc. I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that they are in gmail.
  - onion2k 12y ago
    The fact a user might have installed from somewhere other than the webstore, or if they're on Safari or IE, is entirely irrelevant - the 326k is active users, eg people who have accessed the Rapportive API in the last week. That's everyone using Rapportive regardless of where they installed from or which browser they're in. Whether or not Rapportive is limited by GMail is a good question. Getting 0.065% market penetration after 4 years would worry me, but doesn't mean they weren't making giant piles of cash. You could easily run a profitable business with 326k users even if only a tiny proportion are paying something. The important thing to take away from Rapportive's numbers is that a huge market doesn't automatically translate in to a huge market of available customers for your product. There might only be a tiny proportion who want what you're offering. Fortunately that doesn't actually matter if you can run your business profitably anyway.
alooPotato 12y ago
Founder of Streak here - we've actually thought of adding this functionality to Streak but as others have mentioned the hard part is finding a good data source. Give our current infrastructure, we could build a rapportive replacement pretty quick if we could find a good partner on the data side....
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
harkyns_castle 12y ago
Its beyond me why anyone would want to sign up for Linked In, let alone have them trawl your contacts etc. I don't understand the pressure people feel they're under to sign up. Much like Google, you're the product.

144 points by welder 12y ago

The post offers Full Contact (http://www.fullcontact.com/ http://www.fullcontact.com/) and Vibe (http://vibeapp.co/ http://vibeapp.co/) as alternatives. Does anyone have any other recommendations?

welder 12y ago
https://ark.com/mail https://ark.com/mail http://www.connect6.com/Home/ChromeExtensionDetail http://www.connect6.com/Home/ChromeExtensionDetail http://falcon.io/ http://falcon.io/ (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/falcon/fcbcnboheaijdfnkchlbeilgmaebdogd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/falcon/fcbcnboheai...)
- walterbell 12y ago
  Are these plugins sending every visited web page to their servers, or is this done when the user clicks/hovers on a name/profile?
  - rarjunpillai 12y ago
    I can't talk about others. I'm the founder of Vibe. We take privacy very seriously. We don't read anything more than we should. All we do is 'mark' the emails right in your inbox/page. When you hover/click an email, we send just that email to the server and returns the data,
- priley 12y ago
  Vibe just uses FullContact (see their FAQ) who's data is pretty incomplete. Connect6 uses LeadFerret to power their plugin, which is even worse.
  - rarjunpillai 12y ago
    Hey Priley, Vibe uses FullContact. However, it is not just FC. We have other sources, our own crawlers and APIs as well. This is why we are steadily getting improvement in our data. PS: I'm the founder of Vibe.
jeremi23 12y ago
Collabspot (http://www.collabspot.com http://www.collabspot.com) is also doing this. It is using the data from fullcontact as well that is not as good as the one from rapportive. Collabspot's focus is more on showing/editing your CRM data (salesforce, sugarcrm, highrise) than public info. Disclaimer: i am the founder.
welder 12y ago
This looks almost exactly like Rapportive: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rapporto/lobacefbncbcpbneaggicmoahbikkohg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rapporto/lobacefbn...

rubyrescue 12y ago

326k users? that's... shockingly low

wwwwwwwwww 12y ago
yeah, definitely not very web scale!
welder 12y ago
That number is active Chrome+Firefox extension users, but Rapportive says they serve over 25 req per second from those users: https://success.heroku.com/rapportive https://success.heroku.com/rapportive
codezero 12y ago
Think about it this way, 326k users who've handed over their address books and every incoming/outgoing email address they've used. Their power/value isn't in their users, but their corpus of identities.

s4sharpie 12y ago

Obviously, there are many reasons behind why LinkedIn took this decision (and indeed made the original purchase decision) and they may be using the technology internally at LinkedIn in other ways. And, I am a fan of LinkedIn and use it everyday. Having said that, I am baffled by this. While I appreciate that there is a battle own an individual's primary social network and spend more time/content on LinkedIn vs say Facebook. But, IMHO, wouldn't it have been more prudent to build up the functionality of the LinkedIn component while still offering the functionality that 300k plus users obviously wanted anyway? While this will probably be re-offered (it now looks that it is) as a LinkedIn only plugin, LinkedIn are limiting their reach to only LinkedIn users. Had they continued to build the multi-network capabilities and brought the marketing/reach of LinkedIn to the product, I dare say they could have owned a significant portion of all GMail users and likely been no.1 in the space. Controlling that (and offering preferential treatment to LinkedIn) what definitely add value. Who knows the end result, but it looks like a missed opportunity that someone else will come in and take.

johndavi 12y ago
The original purchase decision I find fantastically brilliant -- and I hate that word. When LI bought Rapportive they bought access to my entire actual social/contact graph, whether I wanted them to have it or not. I've never done the "upload your contacts so we can spam them" on LinkedIn, but because of Rapportive: every one I email, and everyone who emails me, LI knows about. They know the frequency of my interaction, all in exchange for giving me a bit of information about the people who write me. They must have reached a point where either they have mined it sufficiently (and new installs are low) to not worry anymore about crippling it, and/or they realize that the bulk of the data that users care about is the LI data anyway (true for me), and they'd like to try and continue productizing it along that vector -- rather than simply living off the data feed it produces.

mbesto 12y ago

Curious, is there an API that I can send an email string to and get all of their social profiles listed? For example, I put in mike@gmail.com and get facebook.com/mike, twitter.com/mikeguy1, etc EDIT: Looks like FullContact does this: http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/person/ http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/person/

priley 12y ago
Every one of our customers who has access to our API demonstrates that the Ark (YC W12) API has much more data than FullContact's API. Send me an email and I'll hook you up.
- mbesto 12y ago
  Cool, thanks! I just requested beta invite on your website but didn't see your contact details (mine are in my profile).
- lloyddobbler 12y ago
  Kipp from FullContact here. Interestingly, we've had several customers put us head-to-head against Ark in match tests using the same source data sets, and all have wound up going with us due to much higher match rates & better data returned. We always encourage potential customers to try other services. With over 500 paying customers of the FullContact API from some of the internet's largest SaaS providers, we're pretty confident in the quality and quantity of our data. Bottom line is, none of us will have the same amount of data as Rapportive, because Rapportive had direct access to LinkedIn's data warehouse. (And as we all know, LinkedIn has never been shy about hoovering up data from anywhere it can get it.)
zefi 12y ago
Check out Stacklead they do exactly this - YC W14

volandovengo 12y ago

Still works for me...

AdamN 12y ago
me too, but I'm in Kenya. Maybe they just did US users first?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

notlisted 12y ago

I have another theory... It's served its purpose and people are onto them... Let me explain. A while back 'friends' started popping up in my suggestions list. I noticed that many of these were 'private' email addresses, ie email addresses i've used to sign up for a service, and were used only there, and nowhere else. I do not use these addresses to send email, they're only used to receive emails (newsletters etc). When i approached linkedin about this, they claimed i'd given them permission to access my gmail contacts on the mobile app. When i asked them for an exact date, they could not provide me with one, but responded with inStructions on how to remove these contacts. I'm 99% sure that i have never done so, i'm very very careful about this (manage a list of 15k+ members of an organization i run). The answer also did not make sense, because many of these suggested contacts should not show up in my gmail address book (receive-only, no interaction). My theory is that they've used the rapportive lookups to build a database of email addresses checked by my rapportive addon whenever i happen to click on an address in my inbox. If you search online, you'll find many people complaining about linkedin 'inviting' contacts without the initiative being taken by the user, and others who wonder how linkedin knew that they were acquainted with some of the suggested contacts. I must admit i have not bothered to gather conclusive proof of this, but like i said, many of the suggested contacts were single-use (generated on the fly on my own domain, anyone not found is forwarded to my admin account). I have disabled the rapportive addon after their response because i no longer trust it. Did miss it for a while, but with the changes outlined in this article, that's no longer an issue either. Ps i was one of the first 150k members of linkedin. Used to think they were the only decent social network in town. This trust has been lost forever. Guess that's hat happens when you go public. Growth required at all costs.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
codezero 12y ago
I deleted contacts from the site that I apparently imported in 2006, first, it was nearly impossible to find the page that allows you to delete them, and second, they are still showing up as suggestions with the reason of "you imported this contact." They really are gobbling up everything they can, and even if they say they are removing stuff, they never will.

jwcrux 12y ago

It looks like only the front end has changed. I have a Python library (github.com/jordan-wright/rapportive) that directly calls the backend API, and it still works fine.

pcl 12y ago

I dunno... I've literally never used any of those buttons, and the new deeper LinkedIn stuff they expose seems useful.

jasonkester 12y ago

I bet one could make a successful business by just noticing aqcuisitions as they happen and immediately starting work to clone the acquired product exactly. This pattern of shutting down the acquired service and leaving all their users hanging is so common that it seems like it should be easy to capitalize on. In this case, you would have had two years to see this coming (and if you check out the comment thread from when the acquisition happened, you'll notice that everybody did see it coming) and do the rather straightforward development work to get a new version up and running. Then all you'd need do is drop a link in this thread right here today to your feature-wise Rapportive clone that actually still works as advertised, and you'd have 326,000 new customers tomorrow.

asuffield 12y ago
You could do much the same thing looking at startups which are 2 years old. The post-acquisition survival rate of a product is not that much better than the pre-acquisition survival rate - getting bought by a larger company does not mean that they won't eventually decide the same thing you would have found on your own: the product does not bring in enough money to pay for itself. Acquisitions are a risky investment. You buy a company and it might turn out to be worthless.

roh26it 12y ago

It still shows all the user profiles to me. Has this been rolled out only to selective groups?

roh26it 12y ago

Gmail has ~500mn users. Rapportive is possibly the most used Gmail extension out there for Chrome & Firefox. By deduction, Rapportive is the largest business/product built on top of Gmail. With only 326,000 active users isn't it a worry that products on top of Gmail are difficult to market? Is this a reason of fear for companies like Streak and Yesware who bet heavily on the Gmail extension? (Technically their market size would have been 500mn but since the largest player only has 326k users, the total addressable market becomes really small). Something seems off since YC itself has many companies that are following this model. Anything I'm missing out here?

alooPotato 12y ago
Founder of Streak here, we aren't too worried that Rapportive only had 326K users. First that number is a pretty low estimate. Thats their current active weekly users. This is after they let their product die slowly after a few years. This also doesn't count all the installs that didn't use to be from the chrome webstore nor does it count safari and IE. Even if those numbers were accurate, I don't think products like Rapportive/Streak/Yesware are limited at all by Gmail. If anything being in Gmail helps a ton with engagement. The reason the install numbers seem low is the same reason any startup may have low install numbers - their small, they need to perfect their product/distribution/sales/etc. I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that they are in gmail.
- onion2k 12y ago
  The fact a user might have installed from somewhere other than the webstore, or if they're on Safari or IE, is entirely irrelevant - the 326k is active users, eg people who have accessed the Rapportive API in the last week. That's everyone using Rapportive regardless of where they installed from or which browser they're in. Whether or not Rapportive is limited by GMail is a good question. Getting 0.065% market penetration after 4 years would worry me, but doesn't mean they weren't making giant piles of cash. You could easily run a profitable business with 326k users even if only a tiny proportion are paying something. The important thing to take away from Rapportive's numbers is that a huge market doesn't automatically translate in to a huge market of available customers for your product. There might only be a tiny proportion who want what you're offering. Fortunately that doesn't actually matter if you can run your business profitably anyway.

alooPotato 12y ago

Founder of Streak here - we've actually thought of adding this functionality to Streak but as others have mentioned the hard part is finding a good data source. Give our current infrastructure, we could build a rapportive replacement pretty quick if we could find a good partner on the data side....

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

harkyns_castle 12y ago

Its beyond me why anyone would want to sign up for Linked In, let alone have them trawl your contacts etc. I don't understand the pressure people feel they're under to sign up. Much like Google, you're the product.