Years ago a newspaper writer knew that the readers were all reading the news the same way, by holding the newspaper in their hands and reading the article. However, a blogger has no such luxury as a blog reader might be reading the blog post via the blog’s web page, via the blog’s web page on a mobile device, via an RSS feed in one of the many RSS readers, as an RSS feed on another web site or even as part of another application. So even as we select the colors for our blogs and insert carefully designed images and charts every day some new web technology is playing with how some of our readers are seeing the actual blog posts.
The next phase of how information will be viewed is coming along with the pending introduction of Google Wave – but in the meantime several other products are exploring the space of “where your inbox meets the web.” That’s the tag line for Gist as it attempts to save you time and giving you an edge in managing your communications. Gist wants to help you build stronger relationships by allowing you to connect your inbox, with its emails and attachments, to the web’s blog posts and news.
Gist provides a way for you to manage your email and provides a linked dashboard of information about your contacts. Gist integrates recent news about the person, recent blog posts written by the person, recent tweets and recent email communication and attachments. The idea is that with all this data integrated you can make more effective the data that is hidden in all the emails, blogs and web pages that you either read (or should be reading) as you look for ways to grow your relationships with colleagues both inside and outside your organization.
One of the theories behind Gist is that when you have access to the right information, you can get “personal” that much faster for a more fruitful relationship. From my testing, this has the potential to offer a great deal if you are client-facing, but at the same time the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are trying to glom onto social media as well. From a corporate perspective it is much more likely that the CRM systems will be the tool selected by the enterprise. However, for a small organization – often a sole proprietor, Gist can help you discover these insights that otherwise might only be available to a larger corporation with a big CRM system in place.
Gist is still in beta and it some of the features are not perfect yet – but even as I visualize the features all working together I don’t see myself giving up on my Feedly RSS reader or my Outlook email just yet. So that means I’ll be that blog reader who keeps reading your post as you meant it to be read. However, with Google Wave heading towards shore and Gist flush with venture capital – odds are good that more and more people will be looking for ways to further integrate their blog reading, Twitter reading, email and web reading.
It sounds like a great feed and email tool.