Gist helps you to keep track of your social network

Some weeks ago I decided to give Gist a try. This week I became even more interested after they released Gist for iPhone. By using Gist, which by definition means “the essence”,  both on your desktop and iPhone keeping track of your social network becomes very easy. Do you want to know everything about the people you really want to follow? Give Gist a try! With all today’s social networks available it is hard to follow all the people your are following. In fact I presume most people just don’t want to follow everyone in their followers lists. Especially on Twitter the pursuit for the  large amount of followers has been one of the major mistakes and more and more people are becoming aware of this. Still there are a lot of people I would like to know a lot about. I want to know what they are Tweeting, would love to see their updates on LinkedIn and Facebook and I love to read their blog posts. Therefore I requested one of my colleagues to prepare a social networking tool. After some online research I couldn’t find a tool that offered what I was looking for. Unfortunately at that time Gist was not yet available.

Gist brings all social network activity together

Gist is an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox with your social networks, you get business-critical information about key people and companies you like to know more about. Gist is a small, but still growing team of engineers from companies such as Amazon, Jobster, Infospace, Go2Net and Microsoft. They are funded byVulcan Capital and Foundry Group. Since September 15, 2009 Gist has been made available as open Beta. From that moment a lot more people can experience the power of the application. And it offers great possibilities once you manage to set up all your social network links, import all your contacts and link it to your e-mail. Then it will find a lot of information you were even not aware of and it will be presented on a nice profile page.

Who is the most important person to follow?

Today you can easily have over 500 “contacts”, people you are in touch with now and then. But who should you really follow? Gist has special algorithms to calculate the “value” of your contacts. You are able to adjust this calculation. Due to the fact that it seems to be heavily based on your e-mail frequency with your contacts the results can be a bit biased. Probably you do not need to follow the person you are already communicating with the whole day. It could be more attractive to follow good contacts you do not often communicate with. Gist lets you make this decision yourself by manually increasing or decreasing the “value” of the contact.

Know more about who you know

Gist occurs to be able to find information about your contacts you were not aware of. The powerful “search engine” shows for example the blog posts that were written by your contacts and all other online activity. Such information can give you a lot more insight in their interests, business and private life.

Follow the activity of your social network wherever you are

Together with this week’s release for the iPhone it becomes really easy to keep up to date. With Gist for the iPhone you can easily check all the news, blog posts, and tweets from people or companies in your list. You can even include scheduled meetings with your contacts and before the meeting check what recent social activity of this person you should be aware of.

It is still a beta release, but worth trying

Gist is for sure a powerful application, but it still has some flaws. It takes a while to get it up and running and your preferences are not always kept like you intended them to be. Despite these start-up issues you will gain a lot of knowledge about the people you really would like to know more about. I advise you to give it a try if you want to keep track of your contacts’ online activity.