In the battle to achieve simplicity, it's a mouse click here or there that can make all the difference. In the field of image sharing on the Web, Imgur has held the top spot and its simplicity has certainly been one of the reasons.

A new service called Minus has entered the image sharing arena and it makes sharing image files - on their own, in online galleries, and zipped together as downloadable collections - as easy as a quick drag and drop.

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The subtitle to the site, "share simply", says it all. The site is as simple as it gets - stark white with a box in the center asking the user to drag pictures onto the page. From there, the box says, they'll "do the rest." There's no need for account creation, no email confirmations and it's all anonymous if you'd like.

Minus currently limits uploads to a 7 MB max per image, with support for JPEG, GIF, PNG, APNG and BMP file formats. With each image in a collection, you see the image itself, its dimensions, file size and a link to share it. In the upper right corner, there is a box to navigate the collection with an option to download it as a .zip file.

The one thing that almost seems too fancy for the site is the elegance of the image navigation, with only one image showing up in focus at a time. Click on an out of focus image and it smoothly moves into the center and becomes clear as the others move away and blur.

In the end, it's this elegant, simple design and lack of social media clutter, however, that makes Minus feel like what it claims to be - simple.

Watch out, Imgur, there's an even simpler kid on the block.

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Cambridge UK startup Rapportive has released a Firefox and Chrome extension that will replace the ads in your Gmail with photos, biographic data and social media links, including a live display of recent Tweets, for whoever you're corresponding with by email. It's fantastic and takes about 2 minutes to set up.

The three person team behind Rapportive queries data provider Rapleaf for the social media profile data and does some local caching for performance optimization. Let's stop talking about it though - just go download it! Check out the screenshot and details below.

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Trusting the Service

You don't need to give Rapportive your Gmail credentials, the service asks you to login via secure Google Federated Login, or OpenID. The startup doesn't have access to your password, but it does access the contents of your email - that's how it builds a service for you to use. Any browser extension has access to everything you do on the web, but I expect some people will feel a little nervous about installing a webmail related extension from a small company. I don't think that concern is warranted enough to justify missing out on this awesome service.

The company says that if your details are inaccurate you can visit Rapleaf and correct them.

Inbox as Platform

Rapportive is developing a platform for the development of custom applets that other companies can integrate within their local data stores so you can look up an email sender on your own system as part of the Rapportive display. Co-founder Rahul Vohra says such integration takes minutes to set up and in the long term the company hopes to create a marketplace for those applets. Team collaboration so notes left on contacts can be shared is also in the works, as is integration with popular paid CRM and customer service systems.

Rapportive was first reported on by The Next Web this morning.

I've been hoping to find something like this for a long time.

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