LinkedIn declined to comment, while Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra ducked our attempts to talk to him.

Sources familiar with the negotiations said LinkedIn offered Rapportive “low teens” of millions of dollars worth of cash. The deal has not officially closed yet.

Rapportive, which is still available only for Gmail, overlays an email correspondent’s social networking accounts alongside open messages and drafts. So, for instance, you can see a person’s most recent tweet and mention it in your email to them. Or you can realize that you’re not connected on LinkedIn to a person you just had a meeting with, and rectify that.

Rapportive hasn’t publicly disclosed how many people use it, but in September, Vohra was quoted as saying Rapportive users viewed more than 65 million contacts per month. He also said at the time that the company was preparing to sell premium products.

Competitors to Rapportive include Xobni (our coverage) and Mingly (our coverage). LinkedIn also bought a somewhat similar contact management start-up called Connected last fall.

Last spring, Google introduced its own competing “People Widget” for Gmail, which Rapportive then integrated with its own product.

Rapportive raised about $1 million in 2010 from investors including Charles River Ventures, Dave McClure, Paul Buchheit, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar and Venture Hacks.

Organizing your inbox might sound tempting. The Radicati Group reports that the average employee spends about 25 percent of their day on email; by 2013, approximately 507 billion email messages will be sent each day. Many people dream of hyperproductive days unhampered by junk mail, forwards and unimportant exchanges. We’re envious of (and slightly annoyed by) friends who accomplish that “inbox zero” feat (and then post about it on Facebook or Twitter — you know who you are).

But before you get obsessive-compulsive about color-coding and labeling emails, keep in mind that over-organizing doesn’t necessarily solve your email problems. In fact, you’ll likely remember less of the information that’s in the emails if you do that.

A study conducted last year by IBM Research — originally posted on MIT’s Technology Review — found that while “active foldering” reduces the complexity of the inbox, there’s a lack of systematic data about the extent to which these folders are actually used, so it’s hard to determine whether the hours occupied by filing emails to folders is time well spent.

Also, “frequent filers” tend to remember less than non-frequent filers about their email messages. The IBM Research study, which analyzed 345 frequent users’ methods of finding emails, found that email users tended to have pretty good memories when it came to content, purpose, or task-related information in emails, recalling more than 80 percent of such information; those who moved things into folders were less likely to remember these things, possibly because they were not frequently exposed to the information in the inbox.

Of course, users aren’t going to remember everything that’s conveyed in every email. But when it comes to effective search — which in some cases negates the need for all that foldering — remembering key words is, well, key.

Lastly, the study suggests that email threading is the better alternative to manually moving emails into designated folders. People with high thread-count emails were less likely to use or need to use folders, and people with more threads were less likely to need to scroll through their inboxes, as well, suggesting that threads were an effective way to compress inbox information.

Gmail already has a pretty efficient search function and collates emails into threads. But as part of Google’s efforts to push Google+ in other areas — like search — the company is also suggesting Gmail solutions through Google+. In fact, new Gmail users don’t have a choice when it comes to Google+; building a profile is part of the sign-up process. (Google’s current Gmail user base: 350 million; Google’s social network users: Murky.) Searching for emails through Google+’s circles seems a bit confusing for the average user, though, and would benefit only those users who have spent a lot of time building up their Google+ contacts.

For those looking for outside apps to aid in email organization, some of the more popular ones include Xobni and Postbox. Others, such as Shortmail and Clarify, think simpler, shorter emails could put you on the path to inbox nirvana.

(Photo courtesy of robep/Flickr)

Oh, dear — Silicon Valley VCs acting like teenage girls.

And there’s not even a hot start-up in sight to chase and scream over.

It must be the holidays and First Round Capital’s annual digital greeting card, which is based on one of the popular viral videos of the year.

In 2008, First Round did its own version of “Dancing Matt.” In 2009, the firm’s CEOs sang as if they were Susan Boyle in “I Dreamed a Dream.” And last year, it was partner Josh Kopelman wearing a body suit to mimic the Old Spice guy.

This year, it spoofs one of the more irksome music videos of 2011 — Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”

I like First Round’s version a lot better.

Along with the rhythm-impaired VCs, you can see a wide range of their start-ups here, such as Xobni, Path and — thank goodness, since they can sing — Birchbox.

Enjoy:

Maybe relationship management tool Mingly, which today launches as a plug-in for Gmail in Firefox and Chrome, can help.

As an alternative to viewing your inbox by order of most recent message, Mingly shows a feed of contacts and important events drawn from their social streams, like birthdays, relocations and job changes. Then Mingly users can send private and public messages from within the app onto Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or email, whatever they prefer.

The company has raised $500,000 from Idealab, Allen Morgan, Alex Karelin and others. Now based in San Francisco after completing the LUXr lean user experience program, Mingly CEO Tyler Koblasa says Web and mobile apps are on the way, as well as automatic grouping of contacts.

Mingly is one of many social utility apps such as Xobni/Smartr and Rapportive, all of which are useful and awkward in their own ways. In trying many of them, I’ve found they could stand to integrate a lot more cleanly into the existing user experience of Gmail (or whatever they’re modifying).

Social addressbooks seem like they would be most effective as a mobile app or part of the mobile OS — but app developers have less flexibility there, especially in the controlled environment of iOS.

Connected is similar to Xobni/Smartr, but it’s more of a dashboard than a plug-in, and it costs $9.99 per month. The company had raised a seed round of $500,000 led by Trinity Ventures in June. The service has been called “bloody awesome” by Tim O’Reilly.

Connected, which should announce the acquisition later today, consists of the husband-and-wife team of Sachin and Ada Chen Rekhi, who will both be joining LinkedIn. Sachin was previously co-founder of Anywhere.FM, which was acquired by IMEEM, while Ada was director of product at Mochi Media, which was acquired by Shanda Games.

In an email thread last month, I’d asked Sachin to suggest some Connected features that I should check out. Here was his reply:

-Try the search drop-down to find specific people in your network by name, company, title, or location. Curious if anyone in your network works at a new startup? Just do a search by Company which will find all relevant contacts across email, social networks, and address books.

-Click on a given contact to drill into their contact profile. From there you can take notes on the contact, annotate who introduced you, and set contact reminders that will automatically notify you when a certain amount of time has passed since you last contacted them.

-Search for a contact that is not already in your network. Say a new startup founder. If the person is not already in your network, Connected will search across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter for that person. If one of the resulting search results is the person you are looking for, just press “Create” next to their profile and Connected will automatically create a profile with all their public profile data (without having to connect with them). Once you are in the profile, you can also press “Bookmark” next to their other appropriate social profiles and that data will also be pulled in. This is how I was able to create a comprehensive profile for you.

-In addition to the above functionality, there are a set of relationship management apps that try to make this data useful to you on a day-to-day basis. You can explore those apps here: http://connectedhq.com/apps/overview/

The first two Smartr apps are for Gmail and Android, available today; the next one on the list is iPhone. The Gmail and Android apps had previously been in beta, so the news today is more about the overall strategy than their existence. Xobni’s Outlook product will continue to be called Xobni.

All the Smartr apps will learn from users’ emailing, social networking and calling histories, compiling a detailed and constantly updated dossier on each contact. That expresses itself in some handy features, like an autosuggesting email composer that understands which people belong in a group together and whether to use their work or personal email.

That kind of feature may be especially useful on mobile, where users can type just a few letters rather than scroll through alphabetical lists of people they know.

Another Smartr feature compiles an automatic Twitter list of the accounts for all the people a user has recently emailed.

Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte said upcoming Smartr apps will include caller ID and map views, and described recent company hack projects such as a Facebook app that shows when two users first met and an Assassins-style game.

Bonus video: Does the new brand make anyone else think of “The Simpsons”? See below:

What’s funny is many of these developers (in fact, all the examples I just used) run their own app platforms. So everybody’s an app, and everybody’s a platform.

Xobni’s offering has two distinctive aspects: it offers developers access to the millions of corporate Outlook users, and it is built using the open standard OpenSocial APIs so Web app developers will be able to easily extend their products to the desktop.

Xobni said it plans to bring the Gadget Store to its own Web and mobile products, but did not give a date.

Brezina’s first target is the three million or so early adopters of the mobile photo-sharing service Instagram, who take square-shaped pictures from their daily life using their nice iPhone cameras and make them look old-timey and stylized. Sincerely’s new iPhone and Web app launching today, called Postagram, prints an Instagram pic and a 140-character message on a glossy postcard and sends it anywhere in the world for $0.99. (As a launch special, one pic per user is free until 9 am PT on Wednesday.)

Brezina last summer left Xobni, the email application start-up he co-founded, and co-founded Sincerely with early Xobni employee Bryan Kennedy, who had launched and sold an iPhone credit card terminal called Swipe.

The San Francisco-based company isn’t disclosing any fundraising yet, but they have hired three additional employees and outsourced their printing and shipping.

Mobile phones accounted for 42 percent of photos taken last December, according to an NPD Group study. Meanwhile, the Photo Marketing Association reported that 57 percent of prints were picked up at retail (e.g. kiosks), 14 percent ordered online and received by mail, and 27 percent printed at home (though I believe those stats are only for photos from digital still cameras, as camera phone prints are more rare).

During the morning commute on Thursday, Xobni plans to advertise its product around Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus with people spinning Xobni signs stationed at entrances to the main thoroughfares of Microsoft headquarters. A plane will pull a Xobni banner in the sky above the campus. Xobni radio and bus ads in the Seattle area started earlier this week.

Xobni, whose name is inbox spelled backwards, makes a plug-in program for Microsoft’s Outlook that makes it easier to quickly search for messages and contacts in the ubiquitous email software. It also connects Outlook to information on social networking sites like Facebook, pulling in status updates and photos into Outlook so users can see what their contacts and email correspondents are up to.

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The release this week of a flood of documents pertaining to the Viacom (VIA)-YouTube lawsuit shed light on a lot of interesting data–and a lot of, uh, not-so-interesting stuff. Peter Kafka was on duty this week to discern the difference, so you don’t have to. Among the highlights: YouTube’s pre-Google finances revealed, how YouTube split up Google’s (GOOG) billions, proof that Viacom wanted to buy YouTube four years ago, and a whole lot of emails, but no smoking gun. It’s all on MediaMemo.

Over at Digital Daily, John Paczkowski wondered if the licensing of its webOS could be a salvation for Palm (PALM), and later in the week, whether Palm’s dismal third-quarter earnings mean the beginning of the end. John also reported that given details revealed Monday morning, Windows Phone 7 could make Microsoft (MSFT) a contender in the mobile operating system wars. Microsoft isn’t the only company having a good month, however–Mac sales during February were up 43 percent for the month, after a 36 percent spike in sales during January. Accordingly, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has declared 2010 the “Year of the Mac.”

In Personal Technology this week, Walt took a look at two new ThinkPads from Lenovo. A departure from Lenovo’s standard template, they sport lower prices and new designs, and both got good grades. Watch the video of Walt’s comprehensive review and then check out his appearance on WSJ’s “Digits” for more on the new ThinkPads and a discussion of Google’s upcoming foray into television. At Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered readers’ questions about sharing e-books and wiping hard drives. And in the Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret tested Xobni Mobile, an app that generates contact info for everyone users have ever communicated with in Microsoft Outlook. So far Xobni is available for BlackBerry only, but word is, the company’s considering apps for Android and the iPhone.

More next week.