[foaf-dev] Rapportive

via Daniel O'Connor, cc:'d., an interesting Gmail-addon app:
http://rapportive.com/   ... this (amongst presumably other things) is
pulling in data from Google's Social Graph API (and hence from XFN and
FOAF). When you view a mail message in Gmail (including Gmail Apps for
Domains), it shows a sidebar with photos and info about the sender.

IMHO when people look for 'linked data killer apps', they often look
in the wrong places. We don't need some ground shaking wonder site,
... just for our stuff to be unubtrusively useful. Users shouldn't
know it's there.

A couple years ago I gave a talk touching on the idea of an 'invisible
Semantic Web'. ---
http://www.slideshare.net/danbri/when-presentation-849447

"An invisible Semantic Web... Somewhat better search results. Slightly
smarter spam filters. A calendar full of useful information. Long-term
archival tools. Auto-maintained cross-references. Relevant people
grouped in addressbook. "

And this is just the kind of thing I had in mind. I fear this isn't
revolutionary enough for some folk, but hey, we can have a revolution
later too.

The Rapportive app reminds me a bit of the old Gnome Dashboard work,
see Edd's http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-desktop/
and more recently the experiment I made at wiring up SGAPI via Mozilla
Ubiquity (http://danbri.org/words/2008/08/28/369). I think Thunderbird
itself is growing some similar facilities lately too. Anyway, I'll try
using it for a while and see how it works in practice...

Anything that helps people cope with giant email inboxes by putting
faces to names, and conversations in context, has to be worth
investigating.

cheers,

Dan
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