UPDATED 02:01 EST / NOVEMBER 17 2010

Gist Takes the Social Graph Beyond the “Of Course” Moment

Gist has mastered email, social networks and mobile phones.  Now it’s taking its social navigation tool to the browser.  In effect, you’ll be able to take your social graph with you across the web.

Gist’s new tool for Firefox comes in the form of a sidebar, pulling up your contacts and all their relatable info, into your browser experience.  Access your friends’ social networking profiles, pull up your correspondence and shared files, or see stats on your relationship with that contact.  All the aspects of Gist’s aggregation and action tool is now available on-demand, straight from your browser.

It’s a worthy update, considering the movement of browsers these days.  Thanks to open APIs and a rising standard around social media correspondence, the browser is becoming more socially and more sensibly oriented.  Much of this still rides on the back of independent developer teams like Gist, which brings a bit of freedom for consumer use.

Incorporating Gmail, your Android contacts, Outlook, Twitter and more, Gist gives you an at-a-glance take on what’s going on around your network.  Gist is working its way through a number of apps, including Gmail and Outlook, Salesforce, the iPhone and Android.  Extending that ready access to the browser also gives new users a reason to bring Gist’s experience outside of these specific interfaces.

In that regard, Gist is a step beyond what Facebook’s new email system offers, with its walled approach to multichannel messaging.  Seeing the plans of big players like Google and Facebook, however, means a potential need for Gist to adjust accordingly to any disruptive industry changes.

Yet the more Facebook and Google move in this direction of open multichannel communication, the more they’ll continue to open their doors for this consumer-controlled movement of data.

“We call it the ‘of course’ moment,” T.A. McCann, CEO of Gist tells me, when I asked his thoughts on Facebook’s email announcement.  “But there’s more opportunity for more content to be incorporated into this.”

McCann goes on to explain that “from gist perspective, we find it exciting, as we’ve already been working on multichannel correspondence and actions, and already incorporated Facebook messaging. It’s a logical progression. it’s in line with what we’ve already built.”

Gist has no plans on slowing down, either.  McCann fills me in on the company’s plans for a Chrome release soon, among other points of access.  Gist is also looking forward to more opportunities to build around location, noting that it’s an area he’s hoping could be more standardized for API use, normalizing parameters like when and where zip codes, city & state and regions are used.


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