All Things D is reporting that professional social network powerhouse, LinkedIn, will be buying contact start-up Rapportive. The deal isn’t official (yet) and there’s nothing on either Rapportive or LinkedIn’s blog, but seems there are sources saying that it will happen. Not wanting to comment on the validity of this rumor, I wanted to instead focus on the fact that this would be a great deal in the making for both companies – should this actually happen, that is.

In case you’re not familiar with Rapportive, it’s a service that integrates inside Gmail to provide you helpful information about your contacts right inside your inbox. So if you’re crafting an email to a business colleague, that contact’s information and social graph (as long as it’s public) will be displayed right on the screen where you might normally see Google ads being displayed. This is especially helpful since you’re going to get to apply some more context to your emails to help make it more personal. Since its founding in 2010 by Rahul Vohra, Martin Kleppmann and Sam Stokes, the goal of the service was to allow people to immediately see what people look like (using social media avatars), where they’re based, and they do. And just like the name implies, the service is meant to help people establish a rapport that can lead to more conversations, relationships, and success. There’s no doubt that Rapportive has been successful in this area as over 20 million lookups are being done through their system every month!

So why the sudden interest by LinkedIn? Since LinkedIn is the 800 pound gorilla in the professional social network scene, it makes sense that creating some sort of rapport is essential to getting any business done. Whether you want to connect with a potential business partner, looking to hire someone, or even want to be the one that’s hired, a Rapportive-LinkedIn marriage would be beneficial for the end user. Since Rapportive is right now available on Gmail, one might wonder about it’s limited nature and how good it will be in the long-term. In a report by Return Path, at the end of 2010, Gmail had over 193 million users – granted it’s way less than Yahoo! and Hotmail, but it’s picking up steam at a much faster rate than the other two. In 2011, Comscore estimated it at 260 million users, meaning that it’s drastically catching up to the email leaders. So eventually in the near future, Gmail will be the dominate leader in email service and with Rapportive’s integration, LinkedIn will have a great opportunity to extend professional profiles further out there.

Even ReadWriteWeb agrees that LinkedIn and Rapportive would be a match made in heaven. And with LinkedIn’s last acquisition of business card scanning technology Cardmunch, LinkedIn would be able to bolster its offering and create a warehouse of professional contact information. I’ve always wanted to find a way to take all the business cards that I get from conferences and events and mesh them into a contact relationship management system and have it all linked to a professional bio that is updated and associated with my email address book so all I have to do is type in that email address: john@johndoe.com and find out how I know him, how things have been since we last talked, and make the email more meaningful. No longer will I need to waste unnecessary emails chit-chatting…it can all be personal again.

Jon Mitchell from ReadWriteWeb probably puts its best:

LinkedIn is already the go-to network for work contacts. It’s the most comprehensive professional profile most people have. Plus, it’s already openly making moves to be a more extensible service, bringing its human resources know-how to other sites that need it.

Ideally, it would be a great move for both teams and the hope is that this isn’t one of Silicon Valley’s most famous “acqui-hires” where they go for just the talent and not the technology. It is definitely a compatible service and will be a boon for people using LinkedIn.

Photo Credit: “Don’t you come a step closer” by Ed Yourdon/Flickr

More news from Google this week, as the search engine announced its plans to acquire social search engine Aardvark. The details of the acquisition have not been disclosed, though TechCrunch estimates the purchase amount at $50 million. Google is being rather tight-lipped about its plans for Aardvark as well, saying that the announcement of the two companies having signed papers agreeing to the acquisition is all the information it has to give for the time being.

As a social search engine Aardvark aims to provide fast answers based on your social network connections. The idea of relevancy is also quite important to Ardvark, as the search engine also looks to contextualize the search results so that they are useful as well as sourced from trusted friends and acquaintances. Aardvark does so by setting up a Question and Answer platform through which your social connections are leveraged towards seeking actual answers to questions.

It is this social aspect of Aardvark that could be of interest to Google, especially as the search engine advances towards a more contextual search experience. In improving its service and responding to search tools that are leveraging social networks for providing additional context to queries. Google has added several social features to its existing search, giving optimized options to regular Google users.

Outside of improving the existing Google service for its registered users, the company could also seek a way in which socially driven search results could aid non-registered users. The incorporation of Aardvark could give Google additional data with which to apply to its ever-improving algorithms, even if that isn’t a direct social offering to Google users.

As far as Google’s own social advancements go, the company is responding more aggressively to the trends being put forth by Facebook and Twitter. Combining a social aspect to more and more of Google’s apps is one way in which Google is looking to retain and further engage its users while also improving its search utilities.

Whether or not Aardvark will have anything to do with Google’s plans on this end, time will tell. Until then, we’ll have to sit tight and see what else Google is holding up its sleeve.

by Michelle Lentz

Diigo, a research and knowledge sharing tool (social bookmarking and annotations), has acquired Furl from LookSmart. Furl is a web page clipping and archiving service, so it seems like a good fit and, because the deal is being pitched as a partnership in exchange for equity, no one is laying out too much cash right now.

According to Ted West, chief executive officer and president of LookSmart, they are “pleased to know that Furl’s loyal user base will benefit from a reliable platform run by a team highly focused on bringing users the most advanced features and functionality in the marketplace.  The combination drastically changes the social bookmarking landscape and we look forward to being a part of it.” Brian Solis has worked with Diigo to help increase awareness for the company and its array of curation tools and contextual network.

Diigo offers a popular Twitter This feature, which allows you to easily share things to Twitter while browsing and bookmarking.

Diigo's TwitterThis option

It also allows you to easily add highlights and sticky notes to any webpage, and then share the annotated page to your twitter followers. They will just see an ordinary link in the Twitter message; but when clicking on the link, they can also see your highlights and sticky notes on the webpage.

Diigo is about to launch Diigo 4.0, which, when combined with Furl, will aim to “take social bookmarking/annotation to a new height.”

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

by Brian Solis

Interesting news in the micromedia space today. Just read over at the Pownce Blog that Six Apart has acquired the company and will essentially shut it down – in its current state – on December 15th. Leah Culver and Mike Malone are joining the Six Apart engineering team, most likely to focus on integrating a community infrastructure that ties together the company properties, such as Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox.

In the post, co-founder and developer Leah Culver expressed, “We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all…We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products.”

Shot at BarCampBlock, Palo Alto

Good luck Leah and Mike! Stay tuned everyone…

UPDATE (email from Pownce to its users):

We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15, 2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts.

To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.

Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not be accessible after this date.

Please visit our new home to find out more: http://www.sixapart.com/pownce

Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,

The Pownce Crew

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by Brian Solis (for a deeper discussion on the subject, please visit PR 2.0)

Mark Zuckerberg

Kara Swisher FTW – again!

During the Web 2.0 Summit, John Batelle interviewed Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg and if you listened closely enough, it was clear that Batelle was prodding Zuckerberg to validate the rumors that Facebook was exploring the possibility of acquiring Twitter.

With a teasing smile, Zuckerberg described Twitter an “elegant model” and professed that he was “ impressed by what they’ve done.”

Following the session, attendees poured into the hallways dissecting the dialogue to support or discount the prospect of such a bold acquisition.

Kara Swisher has confirmed the rumors, however, an acquisition is not imminent – at least not yet.

Twitter has grown by over 600% in one year. From a business perspective, I can understand why Facebook would consider engaging in negotiations. Twitter is currently reporting six million registered users and last month, the micro community experienced its greatest traffic to date – no doubt bolstered by the 2008 Election.

The deal was close to finalization, but (thankfully) fell apart for very valid reasons.

According to Kara Swisher’s post, Facebook was attempting to acquire Twitter for $500 million in a pure stock deal based on Facebook’s disputed $15 billion valuation. Analysts peg the true estimate of Facebook’s market value closer to $5 billion, which would have positioned Twitter’s sale price at roughly $150 million – a number that investors, the board, and the company’s founders believe is far too low.

Twitter wanted cash and that’s understandable in this market. And there’s a pervasive sentiment that the company might just have a run at generating revenue while continuing to grow the community and how its users communicate with each other in the process.

From Facebook’s perspective, the stock offer was reflective of a conservative approach that reflects the reality that Twitter is not only generating $0 revenue, but its basically a substantial cost center at the moment. At the moment, Twitter pays for SMS fees associated with each text-based update. Facebook estimates that this could cost the company upwards of $75 million annually.

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