Rapportive

» see rapportive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Some tools die because they failed. Rapportive died the other way, because it worked, and then it belonged to a company that needed it to stop working. i lived in Gmail in those years, the way most engineers did. anyway, the sidebar next to it was more of a recruiter and salesperson thing than mine, so i mostly watched this one from the edge.

Rapportive was a browser extension, launched around 2010 out of Y Combinator by Rahul Vohra and Martin Kleppmann. what it did was simple and a little uncanny. you typed someone's email address into Gmail and a panel opened on the right with their photo and their LinkedIn profile, down to the last thing they had tweeted. more or less, it turned a flat address into a person before you had written a word. it was the first Gmail plug-in to reach real scale, millions of installs, tens of millions of lookups a month.

The reason it mattered is the reason it died. Rapportive made LinkedIn's data portable. it lifted a profile out of LinkedIn and dropped it into your inbox, where LinkedIn could not sell you anything or count you as a visit. LinkedIn bought the company in February 2012, for a figure reported around fifteen million dollars, and for a while nothing changed.

Then Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016, and the slow strangling started. the tool got renamed Sales Navigator for Gmail and folded toward the paid tier. LinkedIn kept tightening what any outside tool could pull from its graph, until the thing that made Rapportive feel like magic, the open lookup, barely worked. on the 18th of March 2020 they switched it off for good and called it low adoption. by then that was even true.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

Underneath, Rapportive was a join. it took the email address in front of you and matched it against public profiles across the web, then laid the result over Gmail as if it had always been there. for a few years that felt like the future of the inbox, an address that knew who it belonged to. the catch was that most of the value came from one source, and that source was a company whose whole business was owning the connection between a name and a face.

~ the long tail ~

this part played out mostly in the US, in the world of sales teams and recruiters, and i was not in it. still, the shape of the ending is the interesting part. Rahul Vohra took what he had learned about living inside Gmail and built Superhuman, a fast paid email client, out of it. the sidebar idea did not die so much as get relearned by everyone. Gmail itself, and every CRM after it, ended up showing you who you were writing to. Rapportive just did it first, and did it by reaching into a graph that later decided it did not want to be reached.

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