I use both Rapportive and Gist. Rapportive is nice because it shows me info about the person that sent me an email. Usually. But I generally get the full name and stuff like that.

Gist pretty much tries to put everything together, but since everything is javascript, even running under Firefox 4 makes it rather clunky. I haven’t tried Chrome, maybe I’ll try that combination next. But Gist is pretty damn manual intensive. It won’t go out like Rapportive to even see if it can figure out what somebody’s real name is, which would be a big help. I don’t like the way the news goes, it’s just a bit too much, and why some of those people are ranked so high in importance while others are ignored (which I have fixed manual, it’s the others I guess I need to fix, but sheesh, that’s another manual operation…)

I think I saw Scoble claim that he liked Gist over Rapportive, but I just don’t see why. Rapportive gets me information without even having to hit the site. I don’t find it slowing down Gmail even as it struggles to find something about the email. And the incessant complaints about no last names and no companies (over 250 of my contacts don’t have a last name, and that was after I culled about 100 mailing lists out of those) are enough to drive one batty. I’m sure that I’m not the only person that has a certain email on file, so why when somebody else puts in information, why doesn’t that just show up for me? I understand that personal stuff might not want to be shared, but employment, Flickr and other accounts. And then there’s no undo, so if I accidentally click on something (very liable to happen with the slow as fudge javascript), I have to refresh and find out what I did.

OK, just tried Chrome, it’s not really any faster.