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Etacts, an email add-on that layers social network profiles, conversation history and other relationship management information on top of your email conversations, announced abruptly this morning that it is shutting down its service, deleting all customer data at the end of next month and has "decided to pursue other opportunities."

Having raised more than a half million dollars from some of the hottest investors in Silicon Valley just over six months ago, it's unlikely the Etacts team has decided to go do something unrelated. It is most likely the company has been acquired by a larger firm that does heavy business in email. The Inbox 2.0 market has long been expected to heat up and indeed it has. Etacts competitor Rapportive also recently drew big name funding, Gist is rumored to be in acquisition talks with RIM and now Etacts announces a mysterious shut-down. Update: See our subsequent coverage, it appears to be Salesforce that has acquired Etacts.

When we first looked at the personal relationship manager Gist back in October of last year, we were intrigued. Here was an online service that had a real purpose: to help you make sense out of your email's data. Gist does this by analyzing the relationships in the hidden social network that is your inbox and then determines who and what's important. It's like your own personal CRM system. At the time of our initial review, Gist was still in a closed private beta. Today, the closed trial has ended and everyone can now try Gist. The company has also added some new features to coincidence with the launch.

For years we've been hearing about the problem of information overload. The situation has become so bad that it's now costing businesses $650 billion per year in wasted productivity, according to a study from Basex released earlier this year. To date, we've seen only a handful of real solutions address this issue although none have been what we would call a "killer app." But now we've come across a new tool we want to try: Gist, a web app for organizing your inbox data. We have to admit this one looks intriguing. But will it do the job?