http://falcon.io/ is called “Rapportive for the web.” but it may be a bit misleading. Many of us have used Rapportive and love it. I often go to Rapportive before getting with someone on the phone, as a good way to “Google” the person when I know the email address. (Of course, its “official” integration with LinkedIn is priceless.)
Falcon is not a substitute for Rapportive at all, but rather an extra addition to our toolboxes. The word about Falcon is already spreading out fast among People Sourcers. I hope to make it even more popular with this post.
Falcon.io works like no other tool I know of.
Falcon.io has the look of Rapportive, but the way it works is very different. While Rapportive crawls the data and accumulates information, with an email address as its identifier, Falcon looks up the data dynamically, starting from an existing profile that you mouse over. It implements a variety of algorithms in order to find extra online data for members on each of the five networks it currently “serves”, including Twitter and Github.
There are advantages to both ways of looking up profiles. An email address identifies the right person 100% of the time; but crawling takes time, so Rapportive has some outdated data and some data may not have been crawled yet. On the other hand, Falcon tries to glue together profiles of the same person, which cannot be done perfectly, but it can do this for anyone, here and now. I’d say that Falcon “prompts” in a useful fashion. Strong sourcers can probably reproduce some of the Falcon’s looking up logic but this would need to be done for individual profiles each time. In a way, Falcon does a light version of what TalentBin and other “Dream Software” may be doing in the background, but without storing the data.
There are endless ways in which Falcon can be useful. As an example, on Twitter it can look up people whom Twitter suggests for you to follow; people who are posting interesting things, or are using a #hashtag, say, for a conference; people from lists; or those who are being RT’ed or mentioned by others.
Don’t miss the tool! Let’s support and follow its author Gwendall Esnault. Well done!