Gist is not a system for the casual email user whose main communications involve sending email forwards to friends and pictures of the kids to mom and dad. Instead, Gist is designed to help the professional email user who often opens up their inbox only to feel like it's helplessly out of control. How do you know what the most important communications are? How can you stay up on what your email contacts are doing? Gist aims to solve these problems.

Through ongoing analysis of your email, Gist determines what's important based on the frequency and types of communications that occur. It then provides you with the following: profiles, insights, and actions. Profiles include both individual and company profiles, insights are the relevant information about your most important contacts, and actions are the ability to share news and contact details using the online service.

When you're signed into Gist, you're presented with a dashboard where boxes display key information like your top emailed contacts, news about those contacts, upcoming events, email attachments, and links. All this information is automatically retrieved from your inbox with no effort on your part. It's as if your email inbox serves as the backend database for this unique relationship management system.

Tabs at the top of the page let you move from the dashboard to sections where you can focus on People or Companies specifically, organizing them into groups, tagging them (a new feature), removing those you don't need to track, managing their importance levels via sliders, editing them, and much more. You can also click to view individual contacts and companies and edit the data there if need be.

New Features

One of the new features included in this updated public version of Gist is the ability to pull in contacts from Salesforce. This is a helpful addition to the program which also supports Gmail, Outlook, general Email/IMAP accounts, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You can import your own CSV file, too.

With additional software, Gist can be integrated right into Outlook and Salesforce. The Outlook integration is done via a plugin which pops up a separate window where you can access info on people, companies, events, messages, and attachments. The plugin was available previously, but has been updated in the new version. The company decided to go with a pop-up type of plugin for a few reasons. For one, by not implementing it as an email sidebar (like Xobni does, for instance), Gist data can be accessed from any screen in Outlook whether that's your inbox itself, a contact's details page, a meeting request form, etc. They also made the plugin work more like a mini-browser so it could perform its actions quickly while not slowing down Outlook in the process.

Also new today is Gist's integration with Salesforce. Not only can you pull data into Gist via the CRM system, you can now set up a Gist widget of sorts that displays right in Salesforce itself. Here, you can stay current on news, blogs, tweets, and other relevant information from your Salesforce contacts.

Integration with Twitter and the ability to share via Twitter and Facebook round out the new features in this latest beta build. Since many business folks can't be bothered to friend and follow their contacts on Twitter, Gist does it for you. It doesn't actually follow users on your behalf in your own Twitter account, but it pulls in their tweets from their publicly available timelines right into Gist. You can then respond or share information via Twitter or Facebook - an important step in managing and maintaining communications in today's tech savvy business world. You can still share items via email or flag them for later, as you could with previous Gist versions, too.

For now Gist remains a free service, though a more advanced paid version is in the works for the future. Gist is also working on their mobile offerings but have nothing to announce as far as specialized mobile applications just yet. New users can sign up for Gist now here: www.gist.com

Gist, whose slogan is "where your inbox meets the web," essentially turns your email inbox into a more structured application filled with information while prioritizing the emails that are of the most importance to you. To get started, you connect Gist with your Gmail account. You can also upload a .csv file from either Outlook or LinkedIn. The application then organizes your email and the data extracted from your inbox into a dashboard which gives you a brief overview of the most important items.

The Dashboard & People Pages

On the Gist dashboard, you'll see lists of recent attachments and recent links in the sidebar, high-priority emails in the middle, and important people on the left. Those people are ranked by you using the service's rating slider which gives you granular control over the order in which those names are displayed. When you click on any person listed, you'll see a "people page" that highlights your recent correspondence as well as recent links and attachments, just like the dashboard homepage does.

The People Pages in Gist aren't just snapshots of inbox activity. They also incorporate other information like news about that person and/or their company. That news comes from a number of sources from across the web, like Yahoo News for example, as well as from recent blog posts. With that information on hand, you have an opening to reach out to them be it to congratulate them on their impressive launch or to simply say how much you enjoyed their recent blog post.

Got The Gist?

We've addressed some of the problems with information overload in the past - detailing both the problem and some possible solutions. For email specifically, we looked at five ways to deal with email overload, which focuses on methods like GTD vs. folders and rules. We even looked into some of the applications highlighted at the first IORG (Information Overload Research Group) conference, an event held by the new research group whose founders include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and others. Unfortunately, no one application has effectively solved the problem just yet.

In a way, Gist reminds us a bit of Xobni (our coverage), the Outlook add-in that "socializes your inbox," by automatically extracting info from both your email and LinkedIn. However, Gist's ability to grab recent attachments is more like Xoopit's Gmail add-on (our coverage) that helps you uncover the images, files, and videos you've been emailed. Gist really combines the best of both of those plugins and delivers its results as a web application. Clearly, Gist's service is geared more towards sales professionals, though, as they need to keep up with tons of clients. However, this intelligent application is something that anyone with an overloaded inbox could take advantage of.

Gist's CEO is T.A. McCann, a Seattle-based former Microsoftie who previously worked in Microsoft's Exchange Server Group, an experience which no doubt familiarized him with the information overload occurring in today's inboxes. The company is backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital.

We Want In!

We would love to tell you want we thought of Gist ourselves instead of just describing its features, but Gist is in private beta, and they seem to be very exclusive about who gets in. We couldn't even get an invite for RWW! You can sign up for an invite here, so send us one if you get in before we do.

Xobni, a company obviously catering to business users, have, as of today, launched a new version of their Outlook plugin. Needless to say, the Xobni team really knows their audience because this new version is offering built-in support for LinkedIn, the social network designed for business use.

With the new LinkedIn integration, Xobni now automatically shows a contact's current employer, job title, link to their LinkedIn profile, and contact photo in the app's sidebar. This is especially helpful for those who receive a lot of email from new contacts or have a hard time putting a face to name. Along with the LinkedIn support, Xobni still offers their core features - fast people and attachment search, threaded conversations, and automatic contact profiles.

Download Xobni

Xoopit

Depending on how comfortable you are handling over your email login information, you may find Xoopit either a major security risk or one of the more useful web applications you've seen in a long time. Marshall has argued that Xoopit is proof that Gmail needs a better API, but I decided to throw caution to the wind and use Xoopit anyway because...well...finding attachments is hard.

The service, which came out of private beta just last week, offers a Gmail plugin that lets you search your inbox for photos, videos, and files - all of which are accessible with one click from the new toolbar added to the top of your Gmail inbox. You can also use the addon to find photos, videos, or files sent you by a specific person, and, as you type their name in the box provided, Xoopit helpfully auto-completes the entry.

On the Xoopit homepage, things get a little more interesting. Here, the latest items from your email display in a familiar lifestream-like view that practically has you looking for the "like" button. To the side of the screen, the people who send you the most items are listed and linked to - and those results may surprise you, bringing new insight into what's really going on in your inbox. (Forwarders of chain emails be warned - you've been identified!)

At the time of launch, the Xoopit addon, which is available as a Firefox plugin, did not support Firefox 3, but over the weekend, the Xoopit team added that support, which now makes it worth a download...at least for those who aren't too security conscious.

Download Xoopit

For a demo of Xoopit, you can check out this video:

Upgrading the Inbox

Considering how much of our days, if not our lives, are spent dealing with the non-stop influx of email, it's nice to see some applications that are helping us make our inboxes more efficient while also mining them for important data. Microsoft Outlook, due to its nature of being desktop software, has always lent itself to the addition of plugins - even social ones like OutSync (facebook/Outlook sync) - but the idea of adding plugins to our web inboxes is still relatively new territory.

Because so many people use Gmail, we've seen the innovation begin there. First there was Gina Trapani's Better Gmail Firefox plugin, which arose from a collection of Greasemonkey scripts. Then even Google's Gmail team got in on the act earlier this month with their launch of Gmail Labs, the experimental features you can enable from your "Settings" page. Although some of those features are certainly less useful than others, the fact that Google is also hopping into the inbox addon game means there is definitely growing interest in this area (and say what you want - those "superstars" are really helpful).

Hopefully, the growth in this area will continue and we'll soon find that Google Labs, Xobni, and Xoopit were just the forerunners of the upgraded inbox trend.

Xoopit is aimed at the widespread practice of sharing media like photos, vidoes and PDFs by email. If anyone but the big webmail vendors is going to launch an "inbox 2.0" type product, though, there's going to have to be a better API that lets me access content without giving up my password.

Xoopit doesn't offer a Flash player to listen to music or view PDFs in your inbox, you still have to download those locally and consume them with other applications. (See PDFmenot.com, by the way.) The service may be appealing to more mainstream users who communicate almost entirely through email. Will those users give up the usernames and password to their email accounts, though?

If you'd like to try it out yourself, you can access a beta account through this link. We've written about email password horror stories here before and RWW does take any responsibility for anything that happens if you give a third party yours.

We Need Webmail Content APIs

Gmail released a Gmail Contacts API this month. That's a great way to see who among your friends uses a new application you're using. It does not allow access to the content of your emails, however. All the webmail vendors, most prominently Yahoo!, are working on creating an "Inbox 2.0" experience for users - moving beyond simple one-off messaging and offering an Attention Data driven, media savvy communication hub.

Should users demand more portability, though, for the actual content of our email? Secure portability of content into the hands of 3rd parties seems like a vital step in enabling a whole ecosystem of innovation. Otherwise instead of best practices in user authentication, we get stuck with virtual home decorators unable to anything for us unless we give them a copy of our house keys. At least the people in an analogy like that would be licensed and bonded. Let some brand new web app startup into my email account, with my username and password? No thanks.