Our first interview is with Michael Michaels from here in Seattle.  Michael works in business development for recruiting firm Verticalmove and also organizes a really cool event called Seattle Job Social where job seekers and hiring companies come together and interact socially vs. a more traditional job fair.

We love our users and will be featuring them and their experiences with Gist here frequently.  The first profile and feedback comes from Jeff Rogers who is co-founder & Managing Partner of OneAccord.  OneAccord is a sales and marketing professional services firm focused on helping their clients execute on revenue growth strategies.

Here’s what Jeff had to say about Gist:

“Within a very short time, there was a tangible business result from the use of the tool.  I’m thankful to have thousands of contacts, but keeping up with relevant information is a bit daunting…and time consuming.  However, through Gist I was able to make note of a recent update of a past business associate; I saw an article he posted & sent a short note – it took maybe 2 minutes.  This action re-connected us and led to an introduction for one of the divisions of OneAccord…which, in turn, led to a prospective client engagement.”

Thanks Jeff!  As someone who works with companies on revenue growth strategies, it’s great to hear about the value you are finding with Gist.

We participated in our first joint webinar this week as a guest speaker with The TAS Group talking about how to use social media in selling efforts.  TAS focuses on sales performance automation and has a cool on-demand product that provides a structured methodology for selling.  They are also responsible for the creation of The Sales 2.0 Network which features information about trends and strategies for selling.

We had great attendance (over 400 people) and participation including lots of questions about where to start with social networking and how Gist can increase the quality of interactions in the sales cycle.  Here are a few questions we received and our answers:

1.  Do you have to link Gist to your email account or can you use it solely for its external research power?

Gist is most effective when linked to your email account and there are increasing levels of automation you can choose ranging from manually entering email addresses or company names and having Gist automatically build profiles to uploading your Linkedin contacts to connecting to your Gmail or Outlook.

2.  Will my Outlook content become visible to all other Gist users once I connect?

No, your information and content are not shared with anyone else.  You have the option of connecting all Outlook content or just the header information which limits the content to only the email addresses vs. body content, attachments, or links.

3.  Have you considered integration with a CRM like Salesforce rather than simply email?

Absolutely.  We will be supporting other applications going forward and Salesforce as well as other CRM applications are very much part of that plan.  Our goal is to put Gist in the places where you already spend time like our current support for MS Outlook.  Stay tuned…

4.  Holy Cow! This looks great. Make sure you tell us how to sign up for a trial

Sign up on www.gist.com and be sure to take the survey.  We use your answers to prioritize requests.

Here is the link to the archived presentation “Getting Inside Your Customer’s Head – Automatically” and here are the slides we used.

Thanks to my co-presenter CMO York Bauer and the team at TAS for inviting us and putting on a great event.

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.

Users, Users and More Users…
We’ve been in closed beta since September of last year, and user registrations and beta invites have been growing steadily since then.   Tuesday, was the exception.  As the graphs show below, we got hammered.

Fortunately, all the work that the dev team completed just prior to the announcement paid off and we didn’t have a single service issue.  User registrations increased 50 fold and our overall web traffic increased substantially.

The surprising statistic was that average time spent on the site increased substantially and return visitors also pegged the meter.  We’ve added some great features in our May release; things like Twitter integration, blog discovery and crawling, better news management and better email and data integration.  This is just the beginning.   We envision Gist to be a tool that provides for significant daily value and the depth of our application and feature set will continue to grow substantially over future releases.

User Feedback…
Another great surprise was the amount of feedback from our beta users.  The quality and consistency of the input about our new release and funding announcement has been amazing!  We have been working overtime to follow-up on every single feedback item and love hearing your thoughts on Gist.  Over the next few months we’ll be implementing many of the suggested changes, and feature requests, as well as building out our support staff and infrastructure to better handle the volume of great input that we’ve been receiving.  Much of the feedback has centered on requests for Mac support, better IMAP support, additional device support and better and deeper integration with data feeds.  We’ve also received some great input regarding better compliance with Internet standards (e.g OAuth/OpenID) and we are moving aggressively on further adopting those standards.

Partners…
It’s always interesting to see which companies having synergistic offerings, APIs and relationships also have hungry business development folks watching the news wire.  We’ve had a great response from the folks at Twitter, Facebook, Google and other major players and are looking forward to continued discussions with LinkedIn, Microsoft and many many other partner organizations.  Kudos to the business development folks that have reached out and we definitely look forward to building a great offering that leverages the ecosystem of products and APIs.

Vendors…
Generally speaking, I receive about 200 emails a day…a mix of both internal development related email as well as outside partner and vendor email.  Tuesday was an exception as my email volume almost tripled.  If anyone has transportation needs in the Bay Area, is interested in catering services for vegetarian lunches or is exploring offshore development needs in the Czech Republic, my advice to you is to simply announce a funding event.  My guess is you’ll be connected to more folks than you probably need to be.

At Gist we are very excited to be moving aggressively forward in building the vision of the product that each and every user has helped us define.  We are in a game changing space, at the confluence of inbox data, social data, mainstream structured web data and unstructured public and private information.  We are working hard to surface an aggregated view of all this information in a people and company-centric way to help you manage, interact and communicate with your professional network in a meaningful way. If you are as excited about this space as we are, we are hiring great people so please contact us.

We are thrilled to have Foundry Group and Vulcan behind us but, most importantly, we are humbled by all the great feedback from our users.  Keep it coming!

Steve Newman, Gist CTO

The hard work we did to conceptualize and launch Gist at Vulcan is really paying off as we continue to be amazed at the strong interest from users and smart investors.  There is definitely consensus from all sides that email is in desperate need of revolutionary innovation and that we can unlock some serious value by “connecting the inbox to the web”.

Vulcan and Foundry certainly represent “smart money”.  The team at Foundry has outlined key investment themes including – email and the implicit web which apply directly to Gist.  Add in the knowledge surrounding the semantic web from Paul Allen and Steve Hall at Vulcan Capital, my background in email, CTO Steve Newman’s search expertise, and a team of brilliant engineers and we have quite a bit of brainpower focused on the problem space.

We are going to use the funding to expand the team, build out our infrastructure, and continue to improve the product.  We are looking for the best software brains around and if you want to join us, send us your details.

We are focused on making Gist an essential tool for our users.  As on-line profiles and content proliferate and personal feeds become more mainstream, Gist will automate, aggregate and prioritize this flood of information for you. We want to save you time and bring you new insights, constantly looking for valuable and relevant information about your contacts and their companies.  We will continue to expand the platforms and data connections we support with the goal of putting Gist where you already spend your time – on the web, an email application, a CRM system, or a mobile device…wherever and whenever you need it.

For those of you waiting to try Gist, thank you for your continued patience as we scale up while incorporating all the great feedback from our earliest users.  We will be expanding our beta later in the year, so soon everyone will be able to try Gist.  Until then, take our survey and tell us a little bit about yourself or feel free to send us direct email with your ideas on being in the beta, info@gist.com.

At the end of the day, investors are looking for traction.  Certainly that means product evolution and features, but nothing means more than users!  Thanks to everyone who is in the beta program today for providing such valuable feedback and pushing us toward the future.  Onward.

T.A. and the rest of the Gist team

Analyst Matt Cain is an expert on all things email and we recently spent some time telling him about our product and vision.  Here’s one of the report’s key findings:

“Blending e-mail content with Internet content can vastly increase the visibility users have about people and companies they work with. This could be a boon for sales and customer support.”

And we really love this comment about us:

“On a more practical basis, we expect sales personnel to flock to Gist, since the output provides a much richer portrait of contacts and companies than could be gleaned otherwise (without a significant investment) — supplying users with a ready excuse to stay in touch with customers and prospects.”

So, what does it take to be a cool vendor in the high-performance workplace?

According to Gartner, cool vendors in the high-performance workplace “support the self-provisioning knowledge worker in a quest for better information (and better performance) through Web content integration, process analytics, and social networking.”

The complete “Cool Vendors in the High-Performance Workplace, 2009″ report is available at www.gartner.com.

We continue to expand our private beta at a pace that ensures an amazing product experience.  If you are still waiting (and thousands of you are) please be patient.  We haven’t forgotten about you and are amazed about the huge interest every day.

If you haven’t taken our survey, please do- tinyurl.com/gist-survey.  Your answers help us learn a little more about you and prioritize requests for beta use.  For those that have given us their thoughts, thank you!

Robert Scoble stopped by the office again last week.  We appreciate him being such a great supporter of ours and here’s the video he shot during his visit:

We’ve also been very fortunate to have some great user reviews & blog posts about Gist.  Yes, we’ve asked you to do this and really appreciate everyone who has taken the time to tell us what they think of Gist both via blogging as well as the great emails and feedback comments.  Keep it up!

• Jesse Felder – My Favorite Tech Things
• Venkat Balasubramani – Gist: A First Look at Another Way to Manage Your Inbox
• Pete Warden – Who Are The Email Innovators?
• George Dearing (podcast) – Your Inbox Meets the Web
• Josh Spear – Gist

Here’s more great press on Gist:

• FastCompany Magazine:  Six Tools to Help Tackle Overflowing Email
• CNET/Webware:  Gist hopes to solve your e-mail overload woes
• Mashable: Gist is a Power Networker’s Fantasy Service

And here’s how to connect with us and other great Gist users:

• Become a Fan of Gist on Facebook
• Join Friends of Gist on LinkedIn

Image by luc legay via Flickr

Two very simple and powerful APIs keep cropping up in discussions at Gist: the Twitter API and the Google Social Graph API. These are very significant for identifying people in the arriving “mash and pivot” era of Web services. Humans are uniquely identified on the internet by their email address or URL (OK and maybe their Facebook user ID). From these “keys”, other information like photos, addresses, and phone numbers flow surprisingly freely. This is a glimpse into what the semantic Web will be like. Humans on the internet currently enjoy “privacy through obscurity”. In the near future, the internet is going to become a very public phone (and photo) book.

Lets say for example, all you have is an email address (as is often the case when Gist first discovers someone). The Twitter API lets you look someone up by email address. If Twitter finds a match, you will often immediately have not only a link to the person’s blog and their most recent status update, but oftentimes also recent GPS co-ordinates.

Here’s me, in XML looked up by email. You don’t even have to log in to access this simple machine readable representation of my recent location.

That’s great, but not everybody is on Twitter yet. Email lookups can also be done against much more mainstream sites like Amazon (for wish lists), and Flickr (for photos). How about if all you have is a URL (like to the person’s blog or their public LinkedIn profile). The Google Social Graph API lets you look up related sites by URL. Here are other sites about me that Google found from my public LinkedIn Profile. Here’s the JSON for the the machines reading along.

Now, I’m a very sharing person. But this resolved my public LinkedIn profile into my favorite FriendFeed posts, as well as my music listening habits. All this personal data is made available with very simple APIs built on Web standards, and microformats based on existing HTML markup. The point is that none of the information is centralized, and all of it can be assembled very easily with great confidence about its accuracy.

Some of the Gist developers shared Pizza with with the TalentSpring team the other day. Interestingly, the conversation focused on data partners and Web crawl rather than Web frameworks and software. There was some talk about Amazon’s EC2, which we’re all excited about, but much more talk about data providers like ZoomInfo, Jigsaw, LinkedIn, and Facebook. These are the sources of the the company and personal data that Gist and TalentSpring build upon.

I think this is a challenge a lot of software developers are facing as we move into the “mash and pivot” Web. All new Web apps are built on top of other Web services and data sources these days. The code (Ruby, Python, C#, Java) that glues services together is important, but starting to play a proportionately smaller roll to the interfaces and data that make up modern Web applications. Depending on an application’s problem domain, developers will usually be faced with choosing the best API (usually on the basis of data provided and coverage of their anticipated market). New applications add value by wedging into a particular niche and adding value by re-mixing. Gist gives its users a competitive edge by giving them the first look at the phone book of the future.