BummerLog

Rapleaf

We all have online reputations, whether we choose to try to control them or not. Rapleaf Inc. of San Francisco provides a method of managing individuals’ online reputations similar to eBay’s Feedback feature while collecting information about them from around the Web and offering it up as a people-search service. The two-year-old company has collected $1 million in funding from PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, as well as SoftTechVC, Conway, Senkut and Convergence Partners venture partner Eric Di Benedetto.

Like Facebook, Rapleaf knows the value of mining and harvesting vast amounts of information about people and centralizing it in searchable form. Rapleaf also operates Upscoop, which automatically searches for a user’s contacts on a variety of social networks, and TrustFuse, which sells aggregated data to marketers. Some observers have floated privacy concerns about Rapleaf’s projects, but the company maintains that it’s “more profitable to be ethical.”