When somebody emails you, Rapportive is great!

You can immediately see what people look like, where they are based, and what they do. You can establish rapport by mentioning shared interests. And you can grow your network by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more.

But what about when you send email?

When you start a new conversation, Gmail itself doesn't help at all:

You're emailing Conrad, but you are flying blind.

Where is he? What's he doing? What's he thinking?

What's going on in Conrad's life?

It would be tremendously useful to have Rapportive right here:

Today, we are super-excited to deliver one of our most requested features: you can now use Rapportive when you are composing an email.

By using Rapportive before you email, you can be more astute, personal, and effective. You can find ways to break the ice, topics to bond over, and reasons to get in touch with people. You can even make small gestures such as liking Facebook posts and following on Twitter.

We've been testing this ourselves for a few weeks, and it's already changed the way we write email. We think you'll like it too!

We're gradually rolling the feature out to everybody. But if you can't wait, feel free to upgrade instantly here: rapportive.com/compose :)

Enjoy!

Not yet using Rapportive? Get it free at rapportive.com.

Hurrah! Rapportive users now lookup more than 50 million profiles every month.

We want Rapportive to be the best way to understand and connect with your contacts. We also want lots of people to use Rapportive. As we advance on both fronts, something else is happening as a result: Rapportive is becoming an important place to cultivate your brand.

When people email you, they'll see your Rapportive profile. What do you want them to see?

We want you to be in control. To see and edit your Rapportive profile, just click "my profile" at the bottom of any Rapportive sidebar. Here you can change what people see when they email you.

This approach has worked well so far, but it doesn't cover all cases. For example, many people have more than one email address (I personally use four). If you have multiple addresses, editing your profile like this would change what is shown for your Gmail address, but would not change what is shown for your other addresses. Today, this changes.

You can now edit the profiles for all your email addresses. Click "Claim your email addresses" in the Rapportive menu at the top of Gmail, and follow the instructions. (If the option doesn't appear, please reload your Gmail tab.)

After you've claimed an email address, you can edit its profile whenever it shows in Rapportive: just hover over the parts you want to change.

On the internet, you are who you say you are. Take control.

Claim your email addresses!

Not yet using Rapportive? Get it free at rapportive.com.

I love business cards. There, I've said it.

Business cards have names and photos. They have jobs and companies. They have email addresses, phone numbers, and wide variety of usernames. Business cards are easy to exchange, remind you who people are, and help you reconnect with your contacts later.

Business cards are Rapportive for real life.

I get plenty of cards, so I have a small process to deal with them. I'll fire up Google Contacts, type up the details, then head over to Gmail and send a quick note. It's usually something like "it was great to meet you" or "let's grab a coffee" or "you should totally meet Sam".

Except there's a problem. When a contact emails you back, you don't see their business card. If you want to phone them, you have to jump from Gmail to Google Contacts via a series of clicks just to even see their number. This is crazy, especially considering you've spent time to type up the card! Enough of this craziness: we have now integrated Google Contacts into Rapportive.

To see your Google Contacts in Rapportive, click "Connect my networks" in the Rapportive menu at the top of Gmail, and then click "Sign in with Google".

Over the next hour, any photos, phone numbers and occupations in your Google Contacts will be seamlessly integrated into your Rapportive sidebar. For example, if you had my contact details, you would see my numbers as in the sidebar below.  (Please don't all call at once!)