Tighter integration with Google in latest Gist beta release

In our latest beta release we’ve made a number of changes that our users have been asking for but chief among them is tighter integration with Google. Specifically, we’ve integrated a Google search widget on the People and Company detail pages.

By providing integrated search, we continue along our theme of providing a robust set of tools and features that aggregate information about your network in an easy to use, automated fashion. The Google search widget provides Google image results, blog results and web results. Users can easily add this information to the contact information in their network. Want to change the picture in a profile page? Simply click “Add to Gist” in the Google search widget and the image will become part of that person’s profile.

We’ve also enhanced our identity discovery mechanism by hooking into the Google Social API. One of the most popular features of Gist is it ability to discover data, information and links. By tapping into Google’s API, Gist can navigate the fragmented social landscape for a user’s contacts and piece together web links and social identifiers for many of the millions of people that Gist hosts today. The result is that Gist now has the ability to reference information on a multitude of blog sources, social media sites (e.g. LinkedIn, Digg, etc) and websites in a very automated and simple way for our users.

Each of these new capabilities comes on the heels of Google announcing Google Wave. Wave is still in development but looks to be a major platform for Google and includes the ability for delivering real-time hosted conversations, aggregating content streams and providing a platform for application developers. We’re excited about this great new product and we are busy evaluating the integration points that Wave now offers. Its our goal at Gist to provide a very powerful, rich set of features that our users can leverage to manage their professional network and we are working hard to integrate all that Google has to offer. Surf’s up!

Steve Newman

CTO, Gist, Inc.

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waver

I see direct competition with Gist via Google Wave. How do you plan to address this issue?
http://blog.gist.com steve

We see Wave as a communications and collaboration messaging platform. Its where Google hopes a user will publish and contribute content within communication streams called waves. Gist on the other hand is a tool for evaluating your communication stream, determining who in your network has relative importance, working on behalf of the user to perform identity discovery and pulling in content that will help you leverage your relationships in a professional setting. Its our view that we can leverage Google Wave to enable our product and our services in the same manner that we leverage Gmail, Outlook and other communication and collaboration products. We are working with Google to align our products and our capabilities and we are dedicated to adding some great functionality on top of Wave.

Gist.