LinkedIn acquires Rapportive, a social integration plugin

LinkedIn is emerging strongly and surely as the contender as one of the leaders in social and professional integration. In the past couple of years the company has made giant strides in establishing itself as a social communication and integration platform for professionals to connect and collaborate. In the latest move to further improve the service that it offers to the users, LinkedIn has acquired Rapportive, a company which created a plugin that allows integration of LinkedIn’s service with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. For those who haven’t heard about Rapportive, then the plugin that it creates basically pulls social media content from the networking sites and displays it as a sidebar. Obviously it displays data only from your contacts.

The deal is supposed worth close to $15 million and the formal announcement was made today by Rapportive’s CEO Rahul Vohra. Apparently Rapportive and LinkedIn have been working together for the past few months and LinkedIn was primarily using the plugin services, but it eventually realized that the service is adding a lot of value to the LinkedIn users. The plugin is really convenient and it shows any blogs or status updates your contacts make in their social networking sites.

Anyway, what is not clear is if the Rapportive team will continue working on the plugin after the acquisition or if they will handoff the product to LinkedIn and move out. Rahul feels that there is huge overlap of priorities between the two companies and thinks they will continue working on the product in LinkedIn.