Announcing Clearbit Connect • Hacker News Board

Re: Announcing Clearbit Connect

#11

Post by maxpupmax » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 8:13 PM UTC

niccolop wrote: post #9

maxpupmax wrote: post #4

I'm one of the 7000 Connect beta users and would like to say that I'm very happy with it. Other commenters are comparing this to Rapportive. LinkedIn has discontinued Rapportive and this is an excellent substitute. So far the hit rate for finding emails has been about 80 - 85% in my experience. As an aside: I think Clearbit's building a really excellent suite of APIs, and Connect is only the icing on the cake.

Has Rapportive been discontinued? It still works for me. Or do you mean Linkedin no longer work on it?

Weird. It has never worked for me, and that seems to be the general consensus on the review of the extension. I'm on Chrome/Mac OSX.

What os/browser are you using?

Re: Announcing Clearbit Connect

#12

Post by cloudjacker » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 8:27 PM UTC

natrius wrote: post #10

A product people liked got shut down, so someone else rebuilt it. As a society, we're needlessly duplicating so much effort because we've decided treat software as a private good even though it's non-rivalrous and non-excludable. If we can come up with better ways to fund software, we can end this widespread waste and make progress faster.

in the open source community, the same problem occurs the moment that the steward rejects the pull request. So the altruist forks the project and releases it again with a new name.

Re: Announcing Clearbit Connect

#13

Post by matznerd » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 8:44 PM UTC

gailees wrote: post #8

Does anyone else think it's scary that they are asking everyone on the community plan to share all of their business contacts? ( https://www.dropbox.com/s/uuq96vivlbbrrak/Screenshot%202016-... ) Definitely stopped me from signing up to give it a try.

So sign up for a paid plan? The plugin works well, and at least by being upfront about utilizing your data, you know that there is a sustainable business model behind it, so it will not have to be discontinued or put out to pasture like Rapportive.

Re: Announcing Clearbit Connect

#14

Post by desireco42 » Thu, Apr 07, 2016, 8:47 PM UTC

I am one of beta users, Clearbit is really nice, it really helps me understand and research companies. Not all of them are covered but when they are, it is super useful.

Also, because they have Alex MacCaw on team, for whom I have great respect as a developer, really makes me enjoy and like this product.

Only thing that I encountered as a problem is that privacy plugins tend to disable it and mess with it running. I whitelisted it a little but it somewhat helped, not completely.

Anyhow, really great product.

Re: Announcing Clearbit Connect

#15

Post by tyingq » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 12:51 AM UTC

There's an api, and the pricing isn't cheap, but I feel like this is going to bring a whole new wave of spam after the initially scraped list gets resold over and over.

You might have an additional revenue stream selling an "opt my email out of this thing" plan.

Re: Announcing Clearbit Connect

#16

Post by tyingq » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 1:28 AM UTC

whatnotests wrote: post #7

I built a similar tool back in 2010 - for gmail, yahoo mail and hotmail. It was a browser plugin for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. I learned a lot about Gmail's DOM (it's highly obfuscated) and how terrible the plugin-writer's experience is for Internet Explorer. After six months of promotion on peoplesmart.com as an add-on to allow our users to get more information about the people in their email conversati…

They do provide a very natural way to do it for paid gmail accounts: https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets

Not sure why there's no model to do this for standard gmail accounts.

Re: Announcing Clearbit Connect

#17

Post by niccolop » Mon, Apr 11, 2016, 5:24 PM UTC

maxpupmax wrote: post #11

niccolop wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Rapportive been discontinued? It still works for me. Or do you mean Linkedin no longer work on it?

Weird. It has never worked for me, and that seems to be the general consensus on the review of the extension. I'm on Chrome/Mac OSX. What os/browser are you using?

Chrome/OSX 10.11