Agreed, it would be nice to have an interface to search for people and get a variety of data to cross reference.

Thanks Jeff — if the major use case is looking people up before emailing them, we'll look into ways of adding Rapportive to Gmail's compose window :)

I was going to suggest this too! If I get a business card, I often want to look into the person a bit more *before* I email them. If I could drop in their email address and see everything Rapportive knows, that'd be killer!

Could go unobtrusively at the bottom of the sidebar. Or it could go as a menu item in the rapportive menu at the top of your gmail. It could even just be a search box on the rapportive.com homepage (which people could play with before deciding to install the rapportive plugin).

Thanks!

Thanks James. I like the idea of somewhere in the UI where you can type emails and search for them. It's not clear yet where it should be; we'd certainly want it tucked away as it's not part of the usual use cases for Rapportive.

I receive email addresses many different ways - Twitter, Facebook, IM, business card, phone, etc.

Basically, all methods outside of gmail are fair game because if someone sends me an email address within an email then I can just hover over it to see the Rapportive information.

Another way this feature could be implemented (which seems rather unintrusive, coding-wise) is by adding a small text box at the top of the right Rapportive column. Text in there could be parsed as an email address, and the same actions that occur on-hover within messages could occur when an email address is present in that text box.

Hi James, this is an interesting idea. In these cases, how are people giving your their email address? Is it on a business card, or over the phone, or some other way?