Intro v Rapportive

Rapportive is one of my favorite Chrome extensions. If you haven’t use it (and you’re a Gmail user) go install it now. Rapportive adds a small widget to the right side of your Gmail and brings in information about a user from various social networks. I love being able to see a photo, title, recent social media activity, etc for someone when I message them.

Rapportive was eventually purchased by LinkedIn. LinkedIn just launched Intro, essentially Rapportive for the iPhone. Their engineering team also wrote a blog post titled “Doing the impossible” about the effort to launch Intro, and it really highlights the advantages of the web as a developer ecosystem versus the current mobile environment.

While much of the discussion of the web vs mobile as a development platform centers on the individual developer/team experience, the web really shines when it comes to applications interacting with and building on top of each other — something that is nearly impossible on mobile. While building browser extensions that can augment or alter existing web experiences the way Rapportive did is pretty common and relatively straight-forward, to do the same thing on iOS the LinkedIn team had to accomplish (in their words) three “impossibles” and the approach has been widely criticized for its security implications. Mobile development simply does not provide mechanisms for developers to build on top of or easily integrate with other applications — and this has huge impacts on the ecosystem as a whole.

Another example from applications I use daily is Pocket. I use Pocket to save items I find on the web to read later in a single place. It’s got a great Chrome extensions, so from any page I am one click from bringing adding my current content to my reading list. Great functionality, extremely easy. To replicate that experience on iOS, each application needs to add a “Save to Pocket” function — meaning that many of my common apps (eg NYTimes, magazines) won’t have the capability and for those that do the experience will vary from app to app. Android does this a bit more smoothly with intents — but it’s still not as easy as doing this in the web.

I’d love to see more of the debate about web versus mobile development platforms bring this ecosystem element into the story. It’s a large advantage for the web today and something I really hope mobile platforms get better at over time. There is lots of innovation that comes from letting developers build on top of each other’s work.