Using Rapportive for Source and Information Verification

I’ve been using Rapportive for several few weeks now and have found the tool rather useful for assessing the trustworthiness of a source. Rapportive is an extension for Gmail that allows you to automatically visualize an email sender’s complete profile information right inside your inbox.

So now, when receiving emails from strangers, I can immediately see their profile picture, short bio, twitter handle (including latest tweets), links to their Facebook page, Google+ account, LinkedIn profile, blog, SkypeID, recent pictures they’ve posted, etc. As explained in my blog posts on information forensics, this type of meta-data can be particularly useful when assessing the importance or credibility of a source. To be sure, having a source’s entire digital footprint on hand can be quite revealing (as marketers know full well). Moreover, this type of meta-data was exactly what the Standby Volunteer Task Force was manually looking for when they sought to verify the identify of volunteers during the Libya Crisis Map project with the UN last year.

Obviously, the use of Rapportive alone is not a silver bullet to fully determine the credibility of a source or the authenticity of a source’s identity. But it does add contextual information that can make a difference when seeking to better under-stand the reliability of an email. I’d be curious to know whether Rapportive will be available as a stand-alone platform in the future so it can be used outside of Gmail. A simple web-based search box that allows one to search by email address, twitter handle, etc., with the result being a structured profile of that individual’s entire digital footprint. Anyone know whether similar platforms already exist? They could serve as ideal plugins for platforms like CrisisTracker.