Gmail is –and has been for some time– my primary email tool. The reasons for this grow longer every day. The most recent is a little add-on called rapportive.

Once installed, rapportive searches the web for each of your email contacts and displays profile information (if available), links to social networks, even recent tweets. There’s also a place for notes about that contact.

It looks like rapportive replaces the Google Ads but I’m not sure why Google would allow that.

If your first reaction is, “I don’t want the people I email knowing this stuff about me,” well, you need to run out and buy some stamps and envelopes. If you want to get into my in-box, transparancey is the price of admission.

It’ll take a week or two to know if this is as useful as it first appears. If you are a fan of Gmail, give rapportive a try (it’s free) and let me know what you think.