rapportive-for-real-estate-and-gmailIf you are a small company or want to have a personal account outside of business, you probably have a Gmail account. GMAIL account are also cool because they integrate so well with other contact and email rich technology platforms like Social Networks. As you probably know, you can inport all fo your GMAIL contacts into Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Skype, and an million other products by simply entering your gmail email address and password.

One really cool think that is beginning to happen – every so slowly – but people are beginning to use GmailL.com as thier primary email client rather than Outlook or Mail. The buzz word for this is using the cloud rather than the desktop. Personally, I am a tweener – I use both depending on what I am up to at the moment.

I loaded a plugin to my Gmail account today called Rapportive. With reportive, as I get emails from people – on the right hand side of the email display area I can see the twitter feed, facebook feed, and linkedin feed of the person emailing me. Just the other day I got an email from a client’s staff member I was working with on a project. To the right hand side of the email I saw her facebook feed announcing her pregancy and her twitter feed telling me about a produt launch. These were both very valuable pieces of informaiton about this person that I was pleased to learn.

I think that it is apparant why this would have value for agents, MLS, technology companies, etc. It provides you insight into the lives of your email correspondence.

If you use gmail – visit http://rapportive.com/ and try it out. Its free and you can remove it at any time.