Gist for iPhone; Google Wave for the Rest of Us

by Bill French on 30/05/09 at 11:45 pm

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

It’s been said email is where knowledge goes to die. For decades, information workers have struggled to leverage the value of email archives with little success and an inversely proportional effort. Even more troubling is the lost context and threaded relationships that evaporate whenever sent and received messages are removed from your day-to-day visibility.

GMail has chipped away at this problem by providing a relatively useful email search feature and enough storage to sustain a generous history. Google Wave, still a year or two away, promises to solve this once and for all. In the meantime, business people are left with few choices that enhance the value of everyday communications at the desktop and on the iPhone. However, there’s one service that stands above all other attempts to aggregate, organize, and leverage the information that flows through your inbox, past, present, and future.

If you work in sales, marketing, customer support, public relations or you’re a small business owner or even a C-level executive, you’ll appreciate the elegance of Gist. This web service will digest all your email, attachments, and calendar content and present it in a web environment where you can access it anytime, anywhere – even on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Gist takes the philosophical approach that email is the tip of the iceberg; indeed, a significant contribution to the overall realm of personal and business information, email is but one of the data sources it uses to create a web of relevance surrounding your most important, every-day information flows. Gist does precisely what it’s name suggests; it provides the gist of everything related to your inbox.

Everything?

Everything Gist can find on the public web related to the people, companies, and conversations in your email system. Gist is an aggregator; it sweeps up all your email data including contacts, conversations and calendar events and uses that information as a road map for acquiring related content. Gist also seeks out and presents information about the people that are emailing you and vice-versa. Gist performs thousands of queries to gather a comprehensive picture of where your inbox meets the web.

Gist also provides tuning sliders for companies and people making it easy to establish what’s really important while suppressing information that is less critical to your every-day use. This makes it possible to enhance productivity when dealing with large contact and conversational data sets.

Gist is ideal for business development, due diligence, competitive monitoring, situational awareness, intelligence-gathering, and dozens of other tasks involving anything related to your business relationships and conversations.

Unified Dashboard for iPhone

Imagine all these features in the palm of your hand. While Gist provides a very useful solution for the desktop through a vibrant and highly productive web interface, the mere existence of a unified view of your communications and relationships horizon creates instant envy for access while away from the office. Today, business communications is an always-on proposition; a requirement for information workers who must engage in the immediate web. An iPhone-optimized Safari application delivers on this requirement.

The interface is naturally divided into three categories; people, companies, and events. Compared to native apps, the UI is minimalistic and clearly tilts in favor of simplicity. Performance can be sluggish at times even over a wifi connection. Data elements such as email, telephone numbers, and web addresses are presented as URL’s, so there’s pretty good productivity once you get to the information that you want.

Another challenge with a Safari web interface is access to email attachments. Attached documents can be accessed through the Gist Safari UI but it’s limited to the constraints of a web browser. Native apps provide opportunities to display documents with the advantages inherent in iPhone’s architecture. They also enable the possibility of downloads and local caching, notwithstanding the obvious security requirements.

One feature that’s really helpful on the iPhone (and the desktop version) is search. Even with a slow connection, the dividends are huge. Finding a message that was sent many months ago and plucking one of the attachments for review couldn’t be easier. When looking for information there are times when you quickly remember the company name, but not necessarily the person’s name you were communicating with. With Gist you can search from either a person or company perspective because Gist naturally connects the two in its information mapping process.

No Native App?

Not yet, and perhaps that’s intentional. Native apps introduce far more security issues for enterprises than applications based on web standards. It’s possible that this strategy will help Gist penetrate business and enterprise IT organizations. However, Gist users will expect more; maybe they’re waiting for HTML 5.0. The value that Gist delivers in terms of information access and awareness, and the opportunities to enhance access and usability, is simply too great to ignore the obvious next level of iPhone support.