What I love about Google Chrome the most is that it has a vast number of really great extensions to do almost anything. Not only that there are also competing extensions so you get choice too.
One are where there is plenty of choice is in the personal profile space, in fact Google has it’s own extension for this too. In this context I am talking about the ability to display detailed personal information for a contact alongside an email that you receive from them. There are a number of players in this space including Xobni and Google themselves but my favourite is Rapportive (shown left).
All three work in a similar way by displaying information about an individual to the right of an email in Google Mail. The information that you get depends on the extension that you are using. Google’s own has only very basic information while Xobni has lots of information about your interaction with the contact and is nicely presented but, to me Rapportive, just displays more useful information without you having to go hunting for it.
Rapportive has details about the contact including phone numbers, job title and even latest tweets and Facebook posts. All this information is culled from a variety of sources and to make the most of the service you need to hook up your Twitter/Facebook and LinkedIn accounts but once you do the richness of the information makes it well worth the effort.
What I particularly like is how easy it is to make use of the information shown in the panel. Clicking on a web address will open that site in a new tab. Clicking on the Facebook , LinkedIn or Twitter links will open the users profile in the appropriate social network. Not connected to that user? No problem. Just hit the connect button and an email request is sent. Easy.
And it’s free.
Check it out here.