I’ve been playing with Gist since the beta. After a several week hiatus, I’ve started using the product again. Overall, I think it’s a very good effort at helping people keep up to date with what their friends are doing across the web and helping you stay up to date. The best use case? Checking Gist before you meet up with someone you haven’t seen in awhile. Gist will show you their latest activity on Twitter, LinkedIn, and the web more broadly.
As much as I like Gist and as useful as I think it can ultimately become, I can’t help but feel that this product would do way more for me if it were more like infrastructure and less like an application. What do I mean? Well, instead of having to go to Gist to get these updates, I wish Gist were more like oxygen – it would show up in my calendar when I opened a meeting, show up in my address book when I looked someone up, and generally integrate with all of the other systems I already use to keep track of people and manage my day. It’s hard to start out as infrastructure without a good representative use case deployment and the web product does that. I just hope that Gist eventually becomes something that’s more infrastructure and less destination – you can’t get there overnight but I hope the company’s aims point in that direction.
Indeed, I fully agree. Already wishing this was available as a plugin for CRM applications like Salesforce.com or SugarCRM