“I forgot I setup a membership with that other email address!”

Rapleaf is all about finding information related to a given email address. Often, people are surprised to find an outdated social network profile that is linked to one of their emails. But the other side of the issue is making sure you search all your email addresses with Rapleaf. You may have an email address that you no longer use, but other people know about that email and it may have information linked to it.

One example was my friend, who is in the process of having a background check done for her new job. She checked Rapleaf for her university email address, and was able to see her Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. However, she could remember that she created a MySpace profile back in high school and wasn’t sure why it did not show up on Rapleaf. We suggested she search her other email addresses that she used in high school, and she was eventually able to find that her MySpace profile was linked to her @yahoo.com email address. She then logged on to MySpace and made the necessary changes to her information.

The key take away is that Rapleaf searches based on an email address. We may find some of your memberships for a given email, but if you have used different email addresses to register on other sites, Rapleaf will not find those other memberships until you search that other email address.

If you are a Rapleaf member, you can also add more emails to your Rapleaf profile so Rapleaf can find all applicable memberships that you want to display. It’s easy to add more emails – just sign in and go to this page: http://www.rapleaf.com/PersonalInfo/manage_email

Rapleaf not only has the power to help you build your reputation, but we also provide tools to learn about what information you have out there on the internet. By staying on top of your information, you can better manage your online privacy and control your reputation online.

We’re extremely excited to welcome Eric Wong as the newest Rapleaf engineer! Eric hails from the sunny streets of San Francisco, and is a graduate of UCLA. He’s also an extreme biker – he is really determined and has biked for miles in some of the harshest conditions. Luckily for Eric, his work at Rapleaf will consist mostly of coding. Unluckily for the rest of Rapleaf, Eric is planning a team-building extreme biking trip for 2008.

Another Eric Wong notable: He is an excellent bread maker. We’re already fortunate to have the baking support of significant others, but we’re happy to bring some of that baking talent in-house with Eric. Bread is the preferred snack of the Rapleaf Gorilla.

He’s a former engineer at Zappos and we’re psyched to add him to the Rapleaf engineering squad. He’s already moving our software forward and building some awesome tools for Rapleaf! So give it up for Eric, the newest Rapleaf super engineer!

(PS – We’re still looking for more kick butt coders like Eric…check out our jobs page for the latest opportunities)

Rapleaf has a bunch of groups, organizations, causes, and candidates that are using our data to better democracy. But we still find that most actors in the political process really underestimate social networks.

So we put together a “social networks for dummies” PDF with some up-to-date stats on who is on these social networks and why someone involved in affecting change should care:

social networks and politics

We promised a few weeks ago that we would tell you where the info on your Rapleaf profile was coming from - and we’re happy now to release that functionality to the public. We’ve added a super simple way to see how Rapleaf obtained your profile info, and we point you to the source to correct it.

If you go to a Rapleaf profile, you can scroll over an attribute to see its source. For example, if you scroll over the Gender attribute, you will see the text “Gender found via: sitename” under the information area. Additionally, if the source is one of the sites listed under the profile’s “Memberships” section, the corresponding site will be highlighted.

If information was found on multiple sites, we’ll tell you every site that we found it on.

Screenshot:

Information sources will help you better utilize Rapleaf to manage your online information - by pointing you to the sources of the info, you can easily correct any wrong information that you may have out there.

We are super psyched to announce that Rapleaf will be part of the first ever MashupChallenge, a 3-month contest that allows web developers to compete and build the best Mashup on the web.

We’re making available Rapleaf API v2 in the contest – developers can access portable reputation and identity information for a given person through Rapleaf, and mash it up however they please. This means that you can query Rapleaf for social network profiles, name, age, gender, etc. for a person.

MashupChallenge started today and you can sign up on their official site . They’re giving away some great prizes (from 50%-off hosting for life to a Nintendo Wii) to the kick-butt coders that come up with the most unique mashups. We’re proud to support development on top of APIs, and we look forward to seeing some cool applications being built.

More information on Rapleaf API v2 is here: http://www.rapleaf.com/apidoc/v2

Sign up for MashupChallenge here: http://www.mashupchallenge.com