Rapleaf Address Book API users benefit from the easy to use functionality of our API. It’s a simple API call to integrate into any site, and since Rapleaf maintains an up-to-date code on the importer, you don’t need to spend time building your own importers or doing code maintenance.

Mimi Sun has built a PHP Client Library for the API, making the Address Book API even easier to integrate into your site.  You can see a demo, sample code, and download the full kit here.

The Address Book API allows for a user to import their email contact list (from Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, and Hotmail) into any site. Our API is used on dozens of sites and applications, and is a way for users to invite friends to a site, share content with people in their address book, and import their social relationships.    

Thanks to Mimi for helping make this available. If there are any questions about working with this client library, please email developer@rapleaf.com.

The Rapleaf API, a core component Rapleaf, allows any company or developer to access information on a person and include that in their own site. Such information includes memberships, reputation, and demographic info.

We’re excited to release the Rapleaf Address Book API. It is super easy to use and can help any site increase its reach by allowing users to import their contacts into your site, and further benefit from portable social graphs.

The Address Book API allows you to:

- Ask your users for their email login credentials (for Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail/MSN)

- Securely pass the credentials to the Rapleaf Address Book API

- Obtain the names and email addresses of all the contacts in that person’s address book

It’s all free and really easy to use. User’s privacy is guarded and password information is never stored.

You can find the Address Book API documentation here: http://www.rapleaf.com/apidoc/v2/abook

p.s. - Combine the Address Book API with the Rapleaf Person API to get social network memberships and demographics of each email in that address book.

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 preparing to release version 2 of the Rapleaf API, which will bring API functionality better in line with that of the Rapleaf website. You may have noticed that while Rapleaf profiles have steadily become richer with the addition of membership info and demographics, the API hasn’t kept up. With the release of v2, the API will now offer access to all 3 components of a user profile: reputation, demographics, and memberships. Additionally, the new API has been updated to conform better to REST standards, making better and clearer use of HTTP headers and status codes, and utilizing clearer URLs.

Rapleaf Privacy and the API
Rapleaf empowers people to manage their privacy on the web by alerting them to the public sources of personal information and by providing fine-grained control over which parts of their information are made available via the Rapleaf website. These privacy settings naturally apply to the API output as well, so lookups of email addresses via the API will yield the same information displayed via the website.

“Trustfuse” is now Rapleaf API v2
Some people may have heard the name “Project TrustFuse” to refer to the functionality provided in the new version of the Rapleaf API. As we prepare to release the v2 API more generally, we are making Project TrustFuse public by fully releasing our API.

Usage and Pricing
Performing lookups for reputational information is free of charge for all API consumers, just as it has been with earlier versions of the API. However, access to demographic and membership information via the API will only be available to partners who sign up with Rapleaf for premium access. This prospective revenue source is how we intend to build our business and support the Rapleaf service.

Availability
Available now: Rapleaf API v2 Documentation

We’ve added a highly useful feature for people doing Rapleaf searches. If you search for someone on Rapleaf that we have not seen before, we now have an easy way to click to be notified (via email) when we get the information on the person you are interested in. Just click the big ‘Email’ button and we’ll deliver you the results when ready.

This is great for getting a reminder in your inbox that the search is complete, and a quick way to know when to check back to Rapleaf for the information you were seeking.

Give it a try - search any email address and if we haven’t yet seen the email before, you’ll have the opportunity to receive an update via email once the search is complete.

The other day we announced the release of our new badge designs, and multiple users requested HTML code to add the new badge on personal websites, blogs, classified listings, etc. We’re happy to now make available the ability to embed your Rapleaf badge in a few quick steps.

You can grab our quick embed code straight from your Rapleaf profile when signed in. That code can be pasted on any site that accepts HTML, and will display the same Rapleaf badge that you see on your profile. The best part about using this embed code is that the badge scores will stay up to date automatically. As you increase your Rapleaf score, there is no need to keep getting new code to add to your website – the scores will automatically refresh. Additionally, the badge will link directly to your Rapleaf profile to view social networks and profile stats.
Sharing your Rapleaf badge is a great way to be trusted everywhere you go on the web and another way to gather feedback from buyers, sellers, and friends. We love some of the creative ways that people are coming up with to use the badge, and we’re very excited to make this feature available now to everyone.

For alternative badge designs, check out the ‘Share My Reputation’ page (must be signed in) where you can select from 3 available badge designs that can be used anywhere.

One of the best uses of Rapleaf is learning about what someone likes and often times, you find something that you have in common with that person. This is great for business, friendship, or even just building your trust in someone by knowing what their interests are. A new feature we’ve unveiled at Rapleaf is displaying Amazon Wishlist links on profiles, which is designed to provide exactly that kind of information for a person.

Look someone up on Rapleaf and if they have an Amazon Wishlist, you can click right through to view their interests. For example, I didn’t know that one of our co-founders, Vivek, is a fan of the television show 24. He’s also interested in buying the book The Long Tail – which I have already read. I found this information from his Wishlist - so next time I see Vivek around the office, I’m going to tell him how great of a book The Long Tail was or ask him what he thinks of Jack Bauer.

We hope to see the Amazon Wishlist feature become another great addition to Rapleaf’s online reputation profiles!

A new addition in the feature category here at Rapleaf is the new Rapleaf mobile lookup. You can now view the online reputation of a person directly from your mobile phone!

Head on over to m.rapleaf.com on your phone’s web browser and type in the email address of the person you want to look up. Wait a few seconds and you have instant access to their profile stats, social networks, and Rapleaf reputation score.

Reputation lookups on your mobile phone are a great way to quickly confirm or check the identity of a person. With Rapleaf, you can verify someone’s age, location, and social network memberships. The Rapleaf mobile lookup will increase security in commerce both online and offline, and over time, make the world a more ethical place!

Rapleaf is now on Facebook.

You can add a Rapleaf Reputation application to your Facebook profile to display your reputation on the most popular social utility. This allows you to:

• Build trust among your peers
• Give your friends a more global view of who you are
• Show that you’re a trustworthy Facebook user

As always, Rapleaf is a great tool for commerce. If you buy and sell with other Facebook users, be sure to drop them a Rapleaf rating.

To add Rapleaf to your Facebook profile, click here

Also check out our other Facebook-supported application from Upscoop

Chris is a new addition…and he’s smooth like New Edition. Couple his mental capacity, with fierce tenacity and we’re just glad to see he joined the Rapleaf engineering family.
Here are some Chris Kline facts:

FACT: He’s a blackbelt in martial arts

FACT: He was a drummer in a band in college (Texas A&M)

FACT: He left Dallas Semiconductor/Maxim to change the world (i.e. join Rapleaf)

FACT: He joined the Rapleaf “Live within 7 Blocks from Work” Movement

With our engineers close to work, we’re able to outwit, outlast, and outcode the competition. Go Chris!

Rapleaf Partners have benefitted from our powerful and easy-to-integrate RESTful API for months. And now we are excited to announce expanded support to make integration even easier.

Integration with Rapleaf can now be achieved not just with direct API calls, but also with our new Native API Kits. These are software packages developed with great care to make it exceedingly natural to incorporate Rapleaf into your software.

Ruby, PHP, Perl, and Java Kits are available now, and more will be added soon. (Please email us if you’d like to request support for your programming language of choice.)

The Native API Kits are hosted publicly with Subversion and Trac… so feel free to get in there and create tickets for any bugs or ideas you come across.

The more mash-ups the merrier!

A person’s career can sometimes be dictated by the name given to them. If your name is “Brock”, it’s pretty much expected that you’ll be some type of athlete. Having the name “Jeeves”, well that’s no-brainer.

So we hired a new employee at RapLeaf - his name is “Dummy.” And of course, Dummy* is very slow, he really is. But we hired Dummy for a reason…to take all your abuse.

Rate him at dummy@rapleaf.com - leave a test comment, let him know how upset you are, try out the system; do whatever you want to Dummy. Don’t worry, it’s his job to take it all in. How is he able to do this without getting his feelings hurt? He was born without any emotions. Sad, but true.

But if you do have any helpful feedback for RapLeaf, don’t send it to Dummy. He doesn’t have the mental capacity to know what to do with it. Instead any helpful feedback should be directed to people@rapleaf.com.

So rate Dummy. Rate your friends. And rate those that you bought and sold from.

*Note - Dummy’s last name was withheld for privacy/security reasons.

Skypeteer, the site for the coolest Skype plug-ins, just announced Rapleaf for Skype. you can download the plug-in and your skype picture will always be an up-to-date Rapleaf icon.

also … some people in the Skype community are working on a mash-up for Skype so that you can see someone’s Rapleaf rating every time someone on Skype contacts you.

special thanks to Hans Blaauw in Holland for building the Rapleaf plug-in for Skype.

We had a new employee join us today. Her name is Faelpar. Ok, she’s not human. She’s not even a mammal … But she’s incredibly smart.

Faelpar is our automatic verifyer. Faelpar goes out to the web, finds someone and finds an interesting tidbit about the person … Like confirming that Susie is a realtor or Bob also sells Pez dispensers on Edgeio and eBay.

And Faelpar is kind enough to leave a personal ratings on these people.

More on Faelpar coming soon …

yeah … i was reading Roger’s blog and come across his musing on Rapleaf on my Blog!!!???

he writes:

I want a widget/plugin for my blog that will summarise all RapLeaf information in my sidebar.

and makes a call for action:

Anyone developing anything like this for WordPress?

yeah … cool idea. Roger … let us know how we can help.

and … we just put up Rapleaf Forums in the last hour so people can discuss these ideas. people are encouraged to take on this thread there too.

We have been getting a ton of requests for the Rapleaf APIs recently.

The Rapleaf APIs are ready … but we’re still testing them so we’re not yet releasing them to general public yet. however, we have sent them to about 20 people who are currently using them. we have most of the server-side APIs done and we’re still working on the client-side APIs.

we’ll be releasing them to the general public by the end of the month.

if you are interested in getting hold of the APIs now, send an email to people@rapleaf.com and describe what you are doing and then we can send you the APIs and the API key. and happy mashing!