Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Social Software, Beta
Gist is a social media and personal relationship aggregator
The gist of Gist is that it's a web service that connects your various social media networks with your personal contact information to give you an enhanced view of your connections, and hopefully let the most relevant information rise to the top. It's a sort of filter, with the goal of helping you manage the information overload that is inherent in belonging to multiple social networks.
Okay; the temptation to abuse the word "gist" in this post is overwhelming, but I will now do my best to fight it off.
The power of Gist is its ability to import all of your contacts from your networks and personal contacts. It can then analyze them for overlaps, and surface news about the companies that are associated with your contacts. Currently it can import from LinkedIn, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, Outlook, Gmail, Email/IMAP, and even simple CSV files of contacts.
Once you've imported your contacts, Gist lets you rank them in order of importance. Be careful though; if you import too many all at once, it gets very overwhelming. For example, if you import from Gmail, Gist will import everyone you have ever communicated with instead of only the people who you have actually chosen to add to your contacts list. In Gmail parlance, this means that Gist is importing your All Contacts list instead of your My Contacts list. As a blogger, my All Contacts list has literally thousands of email addresses in it from anyone who has ever sent a tip to one of the blogs I write for, versus only a few hundred in my My Contacts list. Luckily, there's a workaround; just export your My Contacts list in Gmail to an Outlook-compatible CSV file, then import that. What you lose is Gist's ability to analyze your email for interesting links, but in my case the tradeoff is worth it.
Speaking of Gist's ability to analyze your email, this will certainly be a privacy concern for some people. When it analyzes your email, Gist can optionally analyze the body of all of your email messages, or just the contact name and subject of each message. Clearly Gist can get more information about your contacts by analyzing the text of their messages, but that sure feels like handing over too much information.
Frustratingly, in my testing I was unable to get Gist to import my Twitter contacts. Since I've also recently had trouble getting a WordPress plugin to communicate with Twitter, I'm inclined to think the problem is Twitter's fault, not Gist's. Either way, it's still pretty frustrating, since I suspect letting Gist analyze my Twitter contacts adds a lot of value to the service.
The payoff once you've imported all of your contacts and organized them by importance is a dashboard view that presents news articles ordered by how many mentions their related company receives from your contacts. In the end, Gist is largely a personalized news reader that attempts to surface information that will interest you by analyzing your online social contacts. Gist's method for finding relevant news is certainly innovative, though in my case it was only marginally successful. Certainly I would need to spend a lot of time organizing my contacts and filtering out information I'm not interested in before Gist would be able to consistently deliver articles I'm interested in.
Gist is still in beta, and will likely charge for the service once it reaches final release. If you have a lot of contacts and would like a new way to analyze all of your connections, it's certainly worth a look. I'm not sure they've actually achieved the goal of managing information overload just yet, but Gist still offers valuable views into your various online social connections.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
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