Gist: Helps you Organize your Contacts, Email, Calendar

Gist is a web 2.0 start-up with an amazing service: a contacts organizer that actually helps you get things done instead of just cluttering your workflow. It creates a Contacts database by searching different services such as Facebook, Gmail and LinkedIn; and guess what: it’s detailed, up-to date, searchable and actually useful.

Gist – as its name suggests – helps you get the essence about your contacts, greatly improving my workflow these past days. Its algorithm sorted out all the duplicate contacts, a part which more than a few other apps have failed, and mashed everything together – pulling information from social networks, email and even news articles, and ranking the importance of one contact by the number of conversations and the date of the last contact.

By using this process it prioritizes news items in the Gist dashboard – grouped by Company and People – it gives you a sense of what’s happening right now  in your network of people and companies, putting you up-to-speed about the topics you care about. And the best part this service is that you don’t have do the legwork to make it work, just sign in, input your accounts and sit back.

Other notable features are:

• Attachments box which lists recent documents that you’ve received – don’t need to hunt them down anymore.
• Links box shows you recent incoming links – handy if you’re doing research on something or need to reference the link often.
• Syncs with the Outlook Calendar – and soon with Google Calendar.
• Import contacts in .CSV format.
• Manually adjust the importance of a person or add details.

This service is certainly angled at the work/business types – and is a must-have for anyone working with people, like public relations representatives, journalists keeping track of their sources or a company keeping track of its clients.

Gist is currently in private beta, and a lot of features are not yet implemented. Robert from the Gist team assures me that support for more email providers, Twitter and Mac OS X Mail app is on the roadmap. In my tests Gist was stable – no crashes or unexpected behavior; the user interface is simple and easy to use. I still feel a bit queasy about handing over my Gmail credentials, but their Privacy Policy is solid; they clearly state that they won’t share this information and once you delete your account, it is gone, not like Facebook who keeps you account dormant until you manually request deletion.

A downside to Gist is that it doesn’t have an offline mode like Google Reader or Gmail; if you don’t have an internet connection you’re out of luck.

I strongly recommend this service once it officially launches and invite everyone interested to keep an eye on their blog – which is riddled with interesting information about APIs, coding frameworks and announcements regarding the service.