Gist on Tuesday is releasing an application for the iPhone that brings many of the site's big features to user's small pockets. The free app is meant to compliment Gist.com's people-analyzing and organizing tools, letting users get an alert on upcoming meetings as well as background information on those who they're meeting with. This includes how important the user's contacts are, as determined by Gist's algorithms.
Where users will spend most of their time though is the app's dashboard, which breaks down the latest news about people and companies they're corresponding with based on news stories, blog posts, and tweets. This screen doubles as a RSS reading tool too, since you can read small article summaries that your contacts have noted, as well as bookmark them and open them in Safari. It's not the best way to get news headlines on the iPhone, but it's nearly identical to how it works on Gist.com, which should help longtime users feel right at home.
Gist's iPhone app can give you a quick bird's eye view of your past correspondence with one of your contacts.
(Credit: CNET)Other nice features include being able to send your meeting attendees a quick alert that you're running late, and a media viewer that lets you very quickly peruse attachments you've been sent from one of your contacts via e-mail. These two tools alone could be their own iPhone apps.
All is not sugar and spice though. I found the app's loading quite long at times, which can be a deal breaker when you're trying to use it on a cellular data connection--as most users are likely to be doing. And there is no way to use the app without first setting up an account at Gist.com; you cannot do this from the app itself.
It's also inherently missing a way to be integrated into the iPhone's e-mail and calendaring services. This is entirely Apple's fault but means that while you can do a whole lot of viewing of your connected calendar events and e-mail conversations from the app, as far as using it as a two-in-one office tool, it comes up a little short for things like creating new events and searching through old conversations. That falls in line with Gist.com though, which is simply there to serve as an organizational layer on top of the e-mailing and calendaring tools you're already using. It just sticks out a whole lot more on a device where so much of the business utility revolves around those two applications.
The iPhone is not the first platform destined to get a Gist app, but according to the company, it's been the most asked for by users. Versions for other devices will be on the way next year.
Communication organization tool Gist is opening up to everyone on Tuesday, and has come a long way since we profiled its private beta offering back in January. It can still plug into your Gmail, Outlook and LinkedIn accounts and help organize things like personal information, appointments and past correspondence. But since then it's added other sources like Salesforce, Facebook, and Twitter. In fact, the company says it's Twitter's third largest API partner, pulling in all of its users' contacts' tweets in real time.
All of this information is funneled into Gist's dashboard, which now lets you tag contacts to make groups of people you regularly follow. It also lets you filter how much of a contact's timeline you want to see from the last 24 hours, all the way to the last three months. This can help cut down on some of the noise as well as give you a broader overview of what they've been up to, something you can tweak further by turning on and off what kinds of content sources you want to see.
Despite removing the private registration, Gist will remain in beta and free of charge, although a paid subscription service is on the horizon. This will be aimed less at casual users looking to track information about friends and more for business users who want to get quick (or detailed) news flybys of contacts and clients before an important meeting--kind of like what a good personal assistant would offer.
Previously: Gist hopes to solve your e-mail overload woes
Gist gives you a quick look back at your correspondence with someone, as well as incoming news and social feeds from them.
(Credit: CNET)
Over the past few days, I've been using an upcoming e-mail helper called Gist.
Similar to Xobni (coverage) Gist is all about piggybacking on the e-mail systems you're already using to unearth information that's often tucked away. This includes the relationships you have with people you're e-mailing--both professionally and in your personal life.
The big difference is that Gist makes URLs, attachments, and conversation threads easier to get at. And instead of being relegated to Microsoft Outlook, like Xobni is, Gist works with Web mail too.
The service can tap into both Gmail and Outlook, as well as your LinkedIn account. In Gmail's case, this analysis requires giving Gist your log-in credentials. It checks in once a day, syncs up with the last 90 days of your in-box, then figures out the value of each one of your contacts by past correspondence.
Gist sorts out all my contacts to tell me who it believes to be the most important of the bunch. If I think it got it wrong, I can simply adjust the slider, and the list gets reordered.
(Credit: CNET Networks)It's not a perfect system, as illustrated by the fact that it rated my boss' boss a 1 out of 100, but people with whom I regularly corresponded got high marks. Luckily, users can adjust the values that Gist has guessed to get it right.
"We believe that the algorithms can do a strong amount of the work, but ultimately, users generate that system," Gist founder T.A. McCann told me. Gist keeps two scores on each individual, one made by the user and one automatically generated by the system. McCann says the one created by the algorithm changes depending on your correspondence habits, so over time, the values should get more and more accurate.
Any links from your e-mails are gathered by Gist too.
(Credit: CNET Networks)In addition to tracking people, Gist tracks companies. If you've got it hooked up to a work account where you're corresponding with people from different companies, it will give you a breakdown of each one, using data it pulls in from Dow Jones. This includes a news feed of related Internet news stories based on keyword. Likewise, it will cross-reference and list any other contacts you're e-mailing at that company.
For those using Gist with Outlook, McCann says the plug-in Gist has developed is super lightweight and will not slow the program down. Instead of doing the heavy lifting in the background, it will tap only into given messages when you click it on from Outlook's toolbar. It then opens up any information related to that contact or e-mail thread, using a small borderless browser window, which can be dismissed in an instant.
McCann hopes to get Gist into public beta by this summer, alongside an iPhone application that will let users tap into all their data when away from their machine. The service is in a free private beta test version right now, but McCann says it is looking at going with a monthly subscription that throws in some advanced features to paying customers.
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