Gist Launches as Personal Relationship Manager

Gist is a new Web service that trolls the Web for individual and company profiles with the latest information from social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, over 20 million blogs, and over 50,000 news sources. The service, which aims to go beyond the e-mail management and search provided by Xobni and others, is free and integrates with Microsoft Outlook, Google Gmail and Salesforce.com. Take a brief stroll with eWEEK to see what the company calls a “personal relationship manager.”

Gist creates and updates individual and company profiles on the fly as new information becomes available. The application runs in e-mail applications, CRM systems and mobile devices. Once it is installed, Gist users can share news and contact details with others from their profiles. Take a look …

The Gist Dashboard shows users their contacts, companies, preferred news publications and blogs, and Twitter tweets, as well as snapshots of e-mail messages, calendar events and attachments.

Gist user profiles aggregate profile information along with correspondence with contacts, attachments and more.

This is what Gist looks like in Microsoft Outlook. Note the Gist tool bar displaying user contacts.

Outlook might be the mightiest e-mail solution, but it isn’t the only inbox businesses are trolling these days. Gist for Salesforce.com shows the same contact info users see in Outlook, but with a different view tailored for Salesforce.com sales professionals.