A productivity winner: Gist for gmail

I have been a big fan of Gist for a number of months but I have honestly struggled with fitting it into my working style. Unfortunately, many tools like Gist want you to adapt to them, not the other way around. I think, however, Gist for Gmail may finally solve this problem.

Aliza Sherman already wrote a good overview of the application on GigaOM (see below) that you should check-out. I, however, wanted to point out a couple of the key features that are making me more productive as well as highlight a couple of areas Gist will need to improve upon.

My highlights

• As you open e-mails a Gist window pane opens on the righthand side in Gmail. For each user in the To and CC field of the email data known by Gist is displayed (similar to Xobni). I know relative importance (I set this), last tweets, Facebook updates, notes I have made about the person, and much more.
• People not yet in Gist can be easily added through this interface. While it would be much easier if it did not open a new browser window, keep me in the righthand pane, it is still a productivity winner.
• Adding notes about the person or company can be done in the Gist pane, making it easy to not lose track of key pieces of information.
• The ability to see the social feed for people prior to dealing with the email is powerful, possibly providing you with additional information. It would have been nice to be able to respond to the social stream, as you can in the full Gist client, but this is not critical for most people in my opinion.

My recommendation? If you use Gmail you now have a strong reason to use Gist, give it a try.

While I continue to look for ways to better filter and access information about the people in my social graph, the people with whom I do business and those who are somehow connected to me through social networks, “social CRM” company Gist is quietly taking over the world — or at least socializing your web browser. Today, the company announced an extension for Firefox that brings its intelligent data about your contacts to your Gmail (s goog) … Read More

via GigaOM