If you work in the world of social media, it may have been hard to miss that LinkedIn has recently acquired Rapportive (and if you did miss it, read about it here!).

For those of you who have never heard of Rapportive, it is a sidebar for your Gmail that displays social media information from your email contacts while you are responding to them. The tool is very simple to install and easy to use. Its main purpose is to allow you to see a full cross-network profile of your email contacts, including latest posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and let you friend them directly from your Gmail account. In other words, you can keep your network growing by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more without even having to leave the comfort of your Gmail page. In a world where we constantly need to stay connected, this tool can help save you time (and they say time is money).

Rapportive allows you to see what your contact looks like, establish a rapport by mentioning shared interests, retweet their posts, and record important thoughts for later by leaving notes. Users get that and more in an intuitive sidebar where the ads are currently placed (did we mention you don’t need to look at ads anymore?). Check out the free service today.

For those of you who are already using Rapportive, fear not! This acquisition should not derail Rapportive from its original mission to make you brilliant with people. As Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra mentioned in his blog when talking about LinkedIn “we got to know them very well”, “We found a great overlap between our visions” and “We found a high-calibre and extremely driven team.” LinkedIn and Rapportive are both “members-first” companies with the main goal to make their members more successful. Therefore, we expect these firms to complement each other well and to deliver an even better end product. Rahul Vohra seems confident that this partnership will be successful as the transition was made “Slowly, but surely”.

The news became official on February 22, after weeks of rumors that a deal was going to be reached. Even though the financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed at this time, we do know that Rapportive will be fully integrated into LinkedIn.

So far it is hard to tell what will come out of this, but we believe there is a lot of potential. Fission Strategy is looking forward to see what this partnership has to offer and we wish them both the best of luck.