Network Lighthouse

While I was researching for my article about developing a persons online profile I stumbled upon an online service called RapLeaf. It allows you to enter an email address and reports back with a persons online ‘reputation’. The reputation scoring is interesting, but not what I thought was the killer feature. The best feature of this website is that it tracks membership to numerous social networking sites, be it LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace or anyone of over a dozen different sites.

My immediate thought was this is cool, but I want to know about people in my inbox not going to the web every time I get an email from someone. And hence RapLeaf4Thunderburd was born. It utilises the API provided by RapLeaf to obtain various information about the sender of the currently selected email in a statubar at the bottom of the window, including the various social network sites that they are members of.

Check out the screenshot, the persons name has been obscured to protect their identity. Each of the icons represents a social network site that the sender is a member of and if clicked opens a browser to the relevant website and if known straight to their profile.

Having not done any serious code for a while, and never attempted XUL development before, and only a rough understanding of JavaScript, it was a steep learning curve. But four days after discovering the RapLeaf we have the first release of the plugin.

Instructions

After downloading (see below) and installing have a look at the instructions to finish off the install.

Please note this is definitely still a BETA plugin use at your own risk.

Privacy Note

This plugin sends the email address of people communicating with you to RapLeaf.

Version Update

Version 0.4 This version addresses a couple of privacy concerns, it now supports hashing the senders email address before sending it to rapleaf, this is now th default behavior.  Additionally there is now an option to use https instead of http to ensure the request and response are encrypted.

Version 0.5 This version adds caching of previously retrieved data making the experience a lot smoother.   Length of cache time is configurable in the options window and can be disabled by setting cache time to 0.

Version 0.8 This version tidies up a lot, the preferences have been moved into the plugin options, where it should be and other miscellaneous fixes.  Now ready for release, just need more people to post feedback in the forum.

Get it here: rap4tb.xpi or from Mozilla Addons