I’ve come across this nifty plugin for gmail called Rapportive that adds a nice touch to your email experience. What this plugin does is searches the publicly available social profiles of the person and displays that information in your inbox while you are still reading the email.

The information includes a picture of the person plus links to the facebook/twitter/linkedin/Google profiles all together in the side bar where the Google ads used to appear (Curious to hear what Google thinks of this). This feature is extremely useful as it allows you to make new connections with relevant people of interest which would not have been as flexible and certainly less probable if not for this feature. What’s more? You can add a   comment about this person right there in your inbox which can aid as a memory assistant for future conversations with this person. This means you got a nice little social CRM tool running right in your email. Check the screenshot.

I’ve been using this plugin for a couple of weeks and it already has proved to be useful in making a couple of fruitful connections that I otherwise would not have discovered for sure.  The company started in early 2010 and is well funded by some top notch investors, one of them being Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail. Rapportive is looking forward to adding new services and expanding soon to other email clients. They also have a pretty busy crowdsourcing/feedback tool which gives us a nice overview of what features are being worked on/planned for the future etc.,

Give it a shot and install it’s definitely a keeper.