Its been a while since I posted as we’ve been extremely busy building out our product, scaling our infrastructure and getting some great integrations going with folks at Google, Twitter, Facebook and Salesforce.  Here is a quick summary of how we are investing our development:

Integrations
In order for Gist to be a valuable tool that our users use daily, we realize that we need to bring the data to Gist, and bring Gist to our users.  With that in mind, we are heavily investing in data integrations to email, CRM and social networking sites as well as writing plugins, gadgets and widgets (insert favorite UI term here) for many of the same.  We’ve expanded our support for integration with many third party products including SalesForce, Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, iPhone, Twitter and Facebook.   Each of these valuable partners have active programs with Gist and its great to be on the forefront of utilizing their new APIs and putting their data to use in new and interesting ways.  I recently returned from a trip to both Twitter and Facebook and it was very cool to see these companies from the inside, understand their roadmaps and be one of the first companies to utilize their upcoming APIs.  In the most recent version of Gist, we’ve added a SalesForce data integration, an ability to share over Twitter and Facebook and support for Google Calendar events.  As we add more integrations, our algorithms get smarter and our feature set gains more capabilities.  We’ve also got a ton of work going on with each of our UI integrations into these third party systems.  Stay tuned for some major announcements in this area.

Content
Providing our users with news and information thats highly relevant to their professional network has always been a top priority for us.  We’ve recently integrated the Newsgator content stream which adds hundred of thousands of content feeds to our system and built out our feed crawlers to better surface information from Twitter and (soon) Facebook.  We have over 150,000 twitter users that we stream content from as well as over 380,000 Facebook users (and we are still in closed beta!!).  We’ve made major changes to our Dashboard to allow for ease of use and navigation as well as power features for sorting and drilling down into the content that surrounds your network.

Community Features
As our user base grows, so does the value of the data that we manage on behalf of our users.  Data privacy and confidentiality is a core value at Gist and it drives how we build our systems and which features we surface to our users.  In line with that, many of our users have asked for features that allow them to selectively share their data with other trusted Gist users.  We feel this need is especially useful in the enterprise.  Profile requesting and sharing is our first venture here.   We’ll expand this category of capabilities aggressively over the next 6 months.

Finish and Polish
If you’ve been a Gist user for a while you’ve noticed that we turn releases pretty quick.  Each development iteration or sprint is 2 weeks in length and we push new changes to our production infrastructure without fail, at the end of each sprint.  We’ve been running hard and attempting to push new capabilities frequently in order to gain feedback and understand user value and scenarios such that we can refine and iterate.  That said, we are shifting to a more conservative mode over the next couple of months to ensure that we dedicate the time to truly polish and refine those features that are already available.  The redesign and upgrade of the dashboard reader is a great example of this.  In the near term, we are focusing on the first time user experience, account management pages and ensuring that our users can readily consume all that Gist offers in a manner that is clear and easy to understand.  By cycling between moving fast for a period and then shifting to iterating and polishing functionality, we feel we can achieve our goal of user driven development.

Infrastructure
Always the black sheep of the family that no one ever seems to truly appreciate until something breaks…!  This is an ongoing investment for us.  We’ve scaled out our database via data sharding and reworked our news integration to support close to a thousand queries per second.  We’re in the process of implementing a new key/value store based on the Tokyo Tyrant/Cabinet technology which will allow for significant scaling and reliability.  Hardware-wise, we are actively engaged in determining how to host our servers; evaluating colocation providers and cloud providers as well as building out our own datacenter.  All great stuff.  Performance, reliability and availability are key for our users and we’ve got major investments in each component of our infrastructure.

That’s a summary of what we’ve been working on and where we are headed.  Without sounding like a broken record, thanks to all of our beta users for the great feedback.   We appreciate and rely on your input!

Steve Newman, Gist CTO