The Productivity Paradox

In the first of this series I had a look at one of the pioneers in the inbox management area - ClearContext. Then I turned my attention to one of the young guns - Xobni. Today I am delighted to be writing about Gist - where your inbox meets the web. I say delighted, because Robert@Gist commented on my review of Xobni and invited me to check Gist out, which I did.

Before I tell you about my experience with Gist, check out the video below. Robert Scoble of Fast Company.TV recently interviewed T.A. McCann, the CEO of Gist. The video will give you a lot of context.

Now back to my experience.

The first thing that caught my eye on Gist.com was the claim that it could control information overload. It claims that Emails, links, attachments, blog posts, news—all relevant data is organized and prioritized by contact. As you can imagine, this bold claim certainly caught my attention, and I was intrigued to discover how they would manage such a claim.

When you sign up to Gist, it takes a look at your Gmail account (as well as your LinkedIn contacts) and imports all the people and companies it finds embedded within those data sources. (It also does some other stuff with links and attachments, more about that later.) It then separates this information in to two categories (People and Companies) which forms the basis of your interaction with Gist.

The dashboard tab

When you log on to Gist, you are presented with a Dashboard view where you can select a People, Companies or an All News view. In the background Gist has collected (and does so on an ongoing basis) all the news it can find related to the people and companies in your Gmail history.

The screenshot below shows the dashboard view of Gist when I log on:

You will notice that I have recent People News of six of my contacts, which I can read from this Dashboard view. From the Dashboard view I can mark the news as read, off topic or even share it via e-mail. I can also follow the news back to its source by selecting the hyperlinked heading of each article. In a sense this is a personalised news feed for each of my contacts - very useful.

I am presented with the possibility to decrease information overload by deselecting a contact from being watched (by choosing “Don’t watch for news”) or choosing the relevant importance of each contact by using the red slider. More about this feature in the People Tab section.

You have the option of selecting Company News or a combined All News view. I generally prefer the People News view.

On the right hand side of the screen you will notice Attachments and Links blocks. Again Gist has searched my Gmail and found these for me. It doesn’t make sense to me to have them here on the dashboard view. I prefer to see this information as contextual, i.e. where it relates to each contact (and this is exactly where it resides once you drill in to the People view.) You will also notice an Upcoming Events block - complete with an invitation to connect with Outlook to collect this information. I did not do this, and I would like to see integration with Google Calendar for upcoming appointments.

Which brings us to the next tab.

The People tab

As you can see selecting the People tab shows me a prioritized list of all my contacts. Gist allows you to rank the relative importance of each contact and also select them to be watched for news. This can be done on this page, or on the next page I will show you (which shows each contact individually.) You can also manually add a contact from the People tab. A touch I found particularly useful was the merge function (this allows you to merge disparate contact details of a single contact). You can also batch process tasks that relate to contacts by using the Select All / None buttons.

From this People tab you can drill in to a contact or the company they work for. If I select the Alan Alston contact (my brother - I am sure he will not mind too much) I get the following People view:

This is my favourite view. You will notice that Gist has done tons of useful stuff in the background. And neatly categorised it for me in to logical buckets. On the right hand side of the page:

• Correspondence: pretty logical content - the individual e-mails are all hyperlinks back to the original e-mail in Gmail
• Links: all the hyperlinks we have shared in all our e-mails
• Attachments: quite logically, all the attachments in our correspondence
• Recent feed items: Gist found Alan’s Twitter feed and shows it here (the image attached to the overview is his Twitter avatar, again, Gist found this and asked me whether I wanted to use it)
• Shared contacts: all the contact that we shared in our correspondence

On the left hand side of the page, a summary of this contact (i.e. his Gist business card) and our most recent correspondence and his most recent feed item. Below that is a summary of all news items relating to him.

Notice that search is available for every category of data.

His Gist business card tells me that he works for thisarmy. Of course, selecting this takes you to the Company tab, where again, Gist has found and presented relevant information. As illustration, I selected Roche, the company I work for.

The Company tab

You will already be familiar with the basic layout of this page, as it is similar to the People page.

On the right hand side we see:
- People: this shows the contact details of all people with a Roche e-mail account in my Gmail (I have closed the box for privacy concerns)
- Company profile: very useful information pulled from Dow Jones. In my case this is not correct information, as Gist found the information that relates to a subsidiary of Roche. This could be the fault of Dow Jones. In other instances, Gist was more accurate (maybe something to consider developers?)

On the left we see:
- the business card view, where again I can choose whether this company should be screened for news and provide the relative importance of it to Gist.
- the news view: self-explanatory.

So what do I think of Gist and how does it fit in to preventing the productivity paradox?

Gist makes some bold claims, I thought I would tell you what I think if each in turn.

1. Control information overload. Emails, links, attachments, blog posts, news—all relevant data is organized and prioritized by contact.

Agreed, I love the way in which the relevant data is organised and prioritised by contact and company. This is a great idea and it is very well executed. I use this view as a Internet-related summary of people in my address book.

2. Focus your time. Rank importance and fine-tune your experience to pinpoint specific news about your most important people and companies.

True, Gist has paid a lot of attention to allow you to fine-tune how much information you receive about contacts and companies that are important to you (this filter of course greatly assists with information overload).

3. Discover new insights. Be the first to know about relevant news that gives you more opportunities to reconnect.

Agreed, I see this feature as a benefit that results from the way Gist aggregates data following your fine-tuning of the relative importance of that data. I would imagine that this would be invaluable to sales driven individuals.

The bottom line?

So on balance you will notice that I agree that Gist is well on its way to helping you to find relevant and contextual information where your inbox meets the web - keep in mind it is still in beta development. As for addressing information overload, again, I think Gist is a bold step in the right direction, and I am very keen to see how this service develops over time. It is not a one-stop solution to solving information overload, but it is a very innovative take on solving the problem. To be fair, Gist does not claim to solve information overload, it claims to control it.

Speaking of development, Gist is still in beta phase of development. I have noticed that Robert@Gist is increasingly Tweeting about new people signing up as beta testers, so I would advise that you contact him if Gist seems like something that you would be interested in.