themadpeacock

I have been playing with Gist today. Gist is a CRM that brings in contact data from all over the web to help you keep track of all your contacts and what they are doing. Nice idea but it’s still too labor intensive to get set up and the stream reading interface is not as nice as google reader.. but its beta so growing pains are to be expected.

The idea is good, aggregate the blog feeds, twitter updates, linkedin profile updates, facebook updates, company website news from all your contacts in one place. Save you bouncing between Tweetdeck, google reader and facebook to find out what people are doing.

It also integrates you email accounts so you can see email frequency, who you have not emailed in some time, who is connected (coz they were on cc in an email) to who etc. This is like the functionality xobni provides in outlook.

One of the nice features of Gist is that you can rank your contacts by importance to you. Once this is done your home page shows the combined updates from all your contacts as a single stream of news but ranked by importance. This is great if you have a lot of contacts.

I will be keeping an eye on Gist, partly because xobni is not available for the mac.. it could become a useful tool in time.

Today, Gist brings you a better way to communicate and build stronger business relationships. After a year in limited release and with the input of over 10,000 beta users, we have created a new system to aggregate, organize, prioritize and focus your time on the most important things. We connect to your inbox or social networks to discover your key contacts and companies, automatically prioritize them and bring together personal communications, news, blogs, and the real-time web all into one neat package
via Gist Blog – A better way