Discoverly, the San Francisco startup that launched last year with the aim of putting people’s social connections “to work” in the enterprise space, has added some useful updates to its flagship social search tool.
Discoverly’s Chrome browser extension, which debuted in January to let you see mutual Facebook connections while looking at someone’s LinkedIn profile and vice versa, has added two new data sources to its mix: Crunchbase and AngelList. Discoverly’s founder and CEO Theodore Summe tells me that the overall idea is to help people easily find connections.
“The idea is to help you find common ground. If you’re registered on these social tools, you have access to this data yourself, but it’s siloed into individual systems,” Summe said. “This lets you take your social data with you as you travel the web… it’s like a Rapportive to go, that travels the web with you.”
As soon as you download the extension, you can see that it’s a really useful tool. When it’s installed, you simply mouse over the Discoverly icon next to a person’s name on one of the included sites, and you can see any common connections you share on other social networks — the image above is what I see when I look at Dropbox CEO Drew Houston on Crunchbase (who knew we had so much in common?) It’s pretty fascinating to click around and see the various degrees of connection you have to different people.
Summe says that Discoverly has seen early adoption from the LinkedIn “power user” set, many of whom are recruiters looking for common ground to engage with a job candidate. The addition of Crunchbase and Angelist data should expand Discoverly’s usefulness further to the likes of venture capital investors and startup founders.
The Discoverly extension is free, but Summe says the company plans to eventually make money by providing an enterprise offering that can be used within teams at larger companies. That is in beta at the moment, and should be launching at some point in the coming months.
