Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at an advertising industry conference with Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington, my former employer, was bored by the conversation and mocked me throughout it. One of the last questions we were asked on the panel was what technology we were most excited about at the time. I said I was most excited by trends represented by a little startup calledRapportive,which sits in your Gmail sidebar and shows you aggregated information about whoever you are emailing.

Arrington laughed at me, just like he had laughed at me in the conference green room when I showed people photos on my phone of the chickens I was raising in my backyard. Just as I was vindicated when the TV showPortlandialater demonstrated that it is perfectly reasonable to raise chickens here in my home town, so too do I feel a little vindicated by thereported acquisitionin the works of Rapportiveby social network LinkedIn. Ok, so both are a little silly. But the point is: Rapportive is awesome and I was right.

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It wasn't a big acquisition (TechCrunchwas told around $15m) but it was some validation of some big ideas.

Rapportive is a simple thing, and yet it's founded on some complex and potent technology trends. Trends like: identity as platform, harvesting of social network user data and APIs for cross-site functionality. One top of profile data and email adresses, you can build awesome tools.

Rapportive is magical;it's one of the first things I show people when I am excited to show them something about the internet. Many people immediately see the value of it. When we first wrote about it here, we titled our postStop What You Are Doing Right Now and Install This Browser Plug-in. No one objected, it was clearly awesome. (The lineStop What You Are Doingis something best reserved for when you can really back it up.)

Since that time, Rapportive has served as one of the most compelling elements in the still-unfullfilling ecosystem of CRM applications floating around the internet. None solve all your problems, most are hard to make the time to come back to. Not Rapportive, though. Not if you're a Gmail user, anyway. It delivers relationship management value in almost every email you send and recieve.

Much of that value comes from the integration of 3rd party services.There's a whole list of apps built on Rapportive. They sit in your email, look at who you're corresponding with and then let you interact with that person or their content on other social networks. Twitter and LinkedIn have been the best in my experience, but enterprise Rapportive users may have prefered other apps on the platform.

Woe, woe to LinkedIn if they screw with this. If LinkedIn is to Rapportive as Twitter has been to Tweetdeck then I am going to be one unhappy user. If LinkedIn treats Rapportive as well as it has treatedCardMunch(which is a miracle apps) then we're in good shape.

LinkedIn may serve up less data in Rapportive under its watch simply because this is probably the definitive end of Rapportive's relationship with the super-controversial social data mining serviceRapleaf.Many people hate Rapleaf, but they love the Rapportive interface that serves up some of that information. Fortunately Rapportive does not surface some of the information Rapleaf makes available, like home and car ownership and family status.

Rapportive was the best example of what could be done with aggregated user data though! All too often, when you ask someone about aggregated social network user data they immediately say "I'm opposed to it!"

As a platform for the creation of products, services, new ways to relate to the people and the web arround us though - Rapportive is a beautiful example of what the future of the web could be.It's not about apps likePath sucking your phone's contact info into its serverswithout telling you; it's not about services likePinterest seruptitiously changing your shared URLsto capture affiliate revenue.

No, the future of user data as a platform, in its best form, is show you the faces of the people you're meeting by email. It's about helping you connect with them - hey, you might say, I see you sent me an email. I haven't had a chance to reply yet, but you'll notice that I just started following you on Twitter. (A person can also guess another person's email by guessing at variations of their name @ their company domain.com too.)

I sure hope Rapportive can grow and thrive in its new home. And I hope that it will inspire whole new worlds of startups building

Path uploads your entire address book to their servers. This and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities onTwitter,Facebook,LinkedInandGoogle+as well.

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The Price of Free: Path Uploads Entire Address Book To Its Servers

HackerArun Thampi discovered todaythatPath is uploading your entire address book to its servers. Though most people don't expect this liberal sharing of data, Path doesn't warn you ahead of time. Path could generate hashes of the contact info locally, on the user's phone, and only upload that secure information to its servers, but it doesn't. It stores the whole address book unencrypted.

Reactions were strong across the internet today.

Wow @pathsure stepped in the doodoo.plus.google.com/11109108952772...Not good @davemorinnot good.

— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer)February 7, 2012

. @Path.. Is there an OPT OUT of you having my ENTIRE iphone address book on your server ?bit.ly/zKsLky/via @heykim

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano)February 8, 2012

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Facebook can be whatever you want it to be. It's a promotional tool, a way to keep in touch with family members, a space for lifestreaming your every move, or a community forum for meaningful discussion about a specific topic.

But sometimes, it all just gets too overwhelming to deal with. You have 1500 Facebook friends from all walks of life - why? Those social ties expired long ago. So what's the point of holding onto that one last digital thread?

Last weekJenni Prokopy, a Chicago-based health care expert, freelance writer and founder ofChronicBabe.com, posted a status update that directly addressed this issue. With about 800 friends, Prokopy realized that her Facebook profile had become totally cluttered. "I started my Facebook a few years ago when there were no business pages," Prokopy says. "People knew who I was online from ChronicBabe.com, so they started to friend me on Facebook. And I was just trying to build my online community so I said yes - and everyone was like yeah, build your online community! And so I did."

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Before long, Prokopy's Facebook profile had become almost useless. Checking it felt like a chore.

"I was going through tons of posts from people I didn't know, and I don't want to say that I didn't care about them but I didn't care to know the details of their lives," she says. "But the thing that got me a couple of weeks ago is that I missed two important party invitations." They had gotten lost in the flood of meaningless Faecbook marketing 'events' that were actually just invitations to 'participate' in various non-important mass events."

Then there was that whole missing photos from family members thing.

"My sister would post photos of my niece, and I would miss those," says Prokopy. "It felt like my Facebook news feed was Grand Central Station."

A few days later, Prokopy spent 4-5 hours unfriending close to 800 people, decreasing her Facebook community to a mere 280 people. And since then, she's been able to catch status updates from family members that matter to her. "I found out that my brother-in-law and niece, who live in New Orleans, were in a car accident recently. They were dealing with the details so didn't call people individually - they just posted to Facebook. But I spoke with my sister the next day and got all the details."

Russ Starke, VP of Experience Design at digital design agencyThinkBrownstone, had a similar experience with his Facebook profile.

"It was starting to become more of a promotional tool," Starke says. "I wasn't really checking what other people were doing, and I was only occasionally posting photos of kids. After seeing what Jenni was doing, I decided to try it, too."

What really pushed him over the edge was the fact that metadata is tagged to an iPhone picture that a user uploads to Facebook. It's easy to figure out where the user was when they posted the photo. "How is this going to affect my wife and I, and our daughter?" Starke asked himself. He also wanted to post about business trips, but then realized that there were people on his Facebook profile that he didn't trust enough to do that. And then there were those expired ties.

"There are people on Facebookthat, when I look at our friendship history, I see that I've been Facebook friends with them for four years but haven't interacted with them in that entire time. It doesn't mean I don't have fond memories of them, but I don't need to be friends with them on Facebook."

When it comes to Facebook friends, Starke now requires a higher level of intimacy. If he wouldn't allow you in his house, he is not going to be your friend on Facebook. It's just that simple.

Instead of going through the painful one-by-one friend deletion process, Starke decided to shut down his account and start over in a month or so. For now, he's enjoying the freedom that not being on Facebook is giving him.

Should You Be Reading Stories Posted by People You Don't Know?

The Facebook news feed algorithm uses EdgeRank to detect which types of stories the user clicks the most, and surfaces those "highlighted" stories moreso than stories that users are less likely to clickthrough. Is it psychologically damaging to view posts from people who you have little to no connection to?

"While data has not shown that it's unhealthy to perennially view posts from too many friends with whom people lack authentic connectivity, it has been demonstrated that those who do, may do so because they already have lower self-esteem," says Dr. Ashwini Nadkarni, the author of the study"Why Do People Use Facebook?"

She also found that sometimes having more than 250 friends isn't very healthy.

"It has been shown that those users with larger numbers of friends may actually be triggering negative impressions. A study conducted about 3 years ago showed that both profile owners with lower number of friends (about 102 friends) but also greater numbers of friends (about 300 friends) both created impressions of lower levels of social attractiveness."

In other words, having more or less friends than the average Facebook user may affect how other users view you, and how you feel about yourself. Too many Facebook friends might indicate that you're participating in a certainFacebook culture of adolescencehat focuses more on popularity (hello, junior high!) and less on authentic, trusting friendships.

But really, Facebook is about the information thatyouchoose to share. "We need to be curating not only the information we take in but also the information we put out," says Prokopy.

How many Facebook friends do you have? Are you planning to cut back or add more? Tell us in the comments.