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.

Hot on the heels of Facebook's big username land-grab comes news that Facebook may be using the email addresses you import even after you choose not to add them as friends.

The issue occurs if and when you let Facebook search your email contacts for people to invite to become your Facebook friend. As part of this process Facebook will list every contact you have that is already on Facebook, and offer you the chance to "friend" them all at once. You can choose to uncheck the ones that you don't want to friend, essentially skipping them, or choose to skip all of them.

While Facebook makes it clear that they will not store the password for your email account, what they don't make so clear is that they will store the addresses of everyone it found in your email account and keep them associated with you, even the ones that you chose to skip.

So how does Facebook use this information? They present you as a possible contact to the people that you skipped - even if that person has never shown Facebook a connection of any kind to you. Nice, eh? Effectively, Facebook is ignoring your preference to not contact these people by going behind your back to ask them if they want to friend you.

UPDATE: There are reports circulating that this could be a spam/email harvesting site. Use at your own discretion. As with any other email entry service, you have no idea what may happen with your address. Thanks Jeff.

UPDATE2: Please see Alex Rose comments below, webmaster of the service.

Have you ever scribbled down a new contacts email address, only to arrive to your computer and get frustrated with the fact that you can't read your chicken scratch? You are now left with two choices...send emails out to all different variations of the email address, or use Verify Email Address.

Verify Email Address takes the guess work out of whether or not an email address is active. The system verify's email addresses by connecting to the mail server in question and checking that the user name and mailbox exist. Of course this tool can also be used to check out how people have their mail servers set up, which could pose somewhat of a security threat.

Dopplr is a notification service for travelers. This once private location built for a mysterious international team of world travelers is in the early stages of public launch.

Dopplr gives travelers who travel more than five times per year, and their traveling friends the opportunity to share future travel plans, and notify friends in far away places via email or mobile device when they are scheduled to arrive. Taking the guesswork, personal phone calls and emails out of the equation.

Unfortunately this beta is open by invitation only, and members can only be invited when an existing member invites others to join. Once Dopplr comes out for everyone however, it is sure to make a lot of travelers quite happy.

Highrise is an online contact manager built by the famous 37 signals, founders of the ever popular Basecamp project management tool. It was quietly launched yesterday to the public.

Highrise tracks leads, clients and vendors, allowing users to stay on the ball with who gets spoken to, when, and about what. This allows for members of a team to easily decipher the next plans of action. Notes, calls, and tasks can each have reminders set to them for easily remembering to follow up. When signing up for Highrise, each user will get a unique email address, when items are sent to this email, they will automatically become tasks, taking the extra steps out of lining up items to be completed. HIghrise is at its most effective when an entire company works with this online tool. Employees can share vendor, clients, lead, and co-worker information to see what has been previously communicated, and what was acted upon.

Rates vary with Highrise. There is a free plan with 2 users and space for 25 contacts which is great to try out the software and see if it could fit in with your current operation. Then users can choose to upgrade to a basic plan that allows for 400MB of file storage and 5000 contacts for $24/month. If that isn't enough, $149/month can get you unlimited users, 20GB of storage, and up to 50,000 users.

Highrise is a great compliment to the other online software packages that 37 signals offers, as data is communicated effortlessly between all of them.

BigContacts is a web based contact manager where users can upload both personal and business contacts from Outlook of Excel and simply keep track of all contacts in one place. From playing around with the free beta version, this does have a lot of potential. On first glance of the demo, the screen seems a tad busy, and overwhelming. It looks like there is a lot going on, and I wasnt really sure where I should click first. BigContacts might have been better off by making things look a little simpler and less intimidating to o users. Then again, they are still developing this online solution, so I assume things will be changed around a bit when the full launch comes around. BigContacts has used the Web 2.0 application standard, Ajax to build this tool. There are a fair share of features and options that are offered, including Contact clouds that blow up names that have had more activity over another, and team activities that can be tracked through RSS feeds. The contact manager also has the ability to attach photos, notes and files with contacts, which is a great feature for remembering important details about a person. There is a group calendar and Skype integration as well. Last but not least, the BigContacts has the added bonus of being able to review your contacts from any web enabled phone, where users can also review and write notes and tasks. I will be playing with this a bit more to get a greater feel for it. I'm not totally sold on using this yet, but it does have serious potential as a contact manager. The beta is open to everyone and pricing will range from $59.95 for a 10 users account, to a Free 3 user account.

Since I've dumped Apple's email client for Gmail, I've come to miss a few minor features like having images accompany contacts in my address book and the emails I receive from them in the email app itself. As of yesterday, this is one feature I can scratch off my Gmail wishlist, as Google announced they are now rolling out contact pictures to Gmail, with some special sauce to boot. Not only will you be able to add pictures to contacts and see them in their emails you receive, but users can suggest pictures for each other. If you don't see these features in your Gmail account yet, have patience, grasshopper. Google said they're rolling these out to accounts over time, though they didn't specify an ETA for when they'll be done.

Another handy but less whiz-bang feature Gmail rolled out is sound for chat windows. You'll receive a ping for new chat messages now, and this feature is enabled by default (you can toggle it in the prefs). Oddly, you need to have Flash enabled in order to hear the ping.

[via Hawk Wings]