Get the Gist

November 2, 2010 2:35 AM

Gist is an online contacts management system that knows about your social media contacts as well as your IRL friends...

Whether you see it as a tool for aggregating all your contacts' RSS feeds to read in one place, or as merely an online address book, or as a fully-fledged contact management system or just another way of stalking people, if you give Gist access to your social media contacts, your email and your Google Calendar, it'll start to make links and order your relationships in pretty useful ways.

It does take some setting up, and it's false-positives can be a little unweildly to manage for popular netizens (like, um, Number One) but if you like your Web 2.0 invasive and impressive, maybe Gist is for you...

posted by benzo8 (29 comments total)

Respectfully, no.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:45 AM on November 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

It is useful for something: consolidating contact lists into one exportable list. Even tags birthdays if they're publicly accessible.
posted by CrystalDave at 2:52 AM on November 2, 2010

It is useful for something: consolidating contact lists into one exportable list. Even tags birthdays if they're publicly accessible.

Iwithout my glasses I read that as "exploitable".
posted by clarknova at 3:12 AM on November 2, 2010

if you give Gist access to your social media contacts, your email and your Google Calendar, it'll start to make links and order your relationships in pretty useful ways.

but I would not dream of giving some random company all my information and all my login information.
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 3:50 AM on November 2, 2010

Dislike.
posted by doublehappy at 4:08 AM on November 2, 2010

Cool! I've actually been looking for something like this but haven't found a good solution yet. I'll have to give it a try.

To all the paranoid people freaking out -- the management team appear to be relatively seasoned (compared to most tech startups), so it shouldn't be too hard to do some background research into their business ethics.
posted by Jacqueline at 4:25 AM on November 2, 2010

I'm not paranoid, or freaking out. I just prefer not to roll all my separate pieces of online information into one convenient bundle which can ultimately be used any way gist wants.
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 4:39 AM on November 2, 2010

I just prefer not to roll all my separate pieces of online information into one convenient bundle which can ultimately be used any way gist wants.

Exactly. And maybe they say they wouldn't or they would only in certain very specific instances that they'll first ask me about... but then I'm spending time thinking about the ramifications and what have they sussed out that... just, I can't imagine the benefit outweighs the effort.
posted by From Bklyn at 5:02 AM on November 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Facebook is already giving us an ongoing lesson in how many different ways a company can say, "We'll respect your privacy," before violating it in as many different, creative, increasingly nasty ways its team of privacy violators can dream up. Your privacy (and your information) is Facebook's bitch. Name a good reason why any for-profit enterprise would give your privacy the respect you think it deserves.
posted by WalterMitty at 5:30 AM on November 2, 2010 [2 favorites]

Once you sign up (not before, curiously) they say:

"You're in complete control of communications with your contacts. Gist will never communicate with your contacts without your express permission

Your data is there for you and you alone. All of your information is private.

Your data is stored on a secure, private server requiring your credentials for storage and retrieval.

We hope you love Gist, but you can, at any time, delete any or all of your data, and it will be wiped clean from our servers."

I'd call that a big selling point, tbh.
posted by Jofus at 5:34 AM on November 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

I give all my banking numbers to Mint.

oh fuck i'm an idiot.
posted by mccarty.tim at 6:00 AM on November 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

http://xkcd.com/792/

And if someone ever gets into your gist account, you've lost control of EVERYTHING all at once... Very handy.
posted by georgikeith at 6:04 AM on November 2, 2010

Yeah, there are privacy concerns, but I think we can all agree that gist.com is a pretty sweet domain name.
posted by danb at 6:05 AM on November 2, 2010 [3 favorites]

georgikeith: "And if someone ever gets into your gist account, you've lost control of EVERYTHING all at once... Very handy"

Gist connects with your services via OAuth - it doesn't store your passwords in any retrievable way. It also is (generally) only a one-way update - ie: Gist reads your data from other sources and them acts on it locally. To pass updates back, you need to create .vcf files and import them. You can also rescind OAuth authorisation from the remote services as and when you choose.

If you use the same password for everything though, Gist is the least of your worries.
posted by benzo8 at 6:13 AM on November 2, 2010 [3 favorites]

I signed up for Gist last year and logged in once. I logged in again about four or five months ago. Haven't been back, maybe because I already segregated all of my contacts unconsciously over the years.

Also, it's my opinion that this was a fairly one-sided promotional pitch for a product and/or service and thus just reading it made me feel queasy.
posted by jsavimbi at 6:30 AM on November 2, 2010

jsavimbi: "Also, it's my opinion that this was a fairly one-sided promotional pitch for a product and/or service and thus just reading it made me feel queasy."

Yes, I'm sorry I didn't overload the post with various unrelated links and that I harked back to the older days of MeFi where we brought to people's attention the interesting things we'd found on the 'Net.

For reference, I have no connection to Gist, discovered it this weekend through a Lifehacker post and was surprised it hadn't been discussed on MetaFilter before now. Take some Pepto for your queasiness (or is that too Pepto Pink for you?)
posted by benzo8 at 6:37 AM on November 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

i've tried it and maybe it's because i didnt use it too long but i actually dont find it useful. i can make lists. am looking for something other than fucking lists of people :P cant any of these services do better visualizations of social graphs? if it is a social graph it is not a fucking list :P
posted by liza at 8:19 AM on November 2, 2010

and to add to the people saying they dont want to roll all their info into GIST : am so sick and tired of web services that have no stand alone versions of their software you can run on your server. it's time we start thinking of services as rhizomes or federations of servers, not as "the ring to rule them all". this whole idea that you have to go to the one domain and trust them with your info is fucking ridiculous. i have my server, give me the ability to run the software and add levels of encryption/privacy to my suiting.

but that would be hard and entail actual usability and user-centric development, wouldnt it :P
posted by liza at 8:25 AM on November 2, 2010 [2 favorites]

Yes, I'm sorry I didn't overload the post with various unrelated links and that I harked back to the older days of MeFi where we brought to people's attention the interesting things we'd found on the 'Net.

For reference, I have no connection to Gist, discovered it this weekend through a Lifehacker post and was surprised it hadn't been discussed on MetaFilter before now. Take some Pepto for your queasiness (or is that too Pepto Pink for you?)

Granted, I've only signed up for Metafilter recently, but I would imagine (and hope others agree) that Metafilter has moved on from 'simply posting things we found on the Internet' to 'analyzing things we've found on the Internet.' Many times I've actually preferred to read Metafilter's analysis of a link far more often than actually clicking on the link. Especially today, where the Internet has evolved to everybody re-posting things found elsewhere, it's always refreshing to see people on the big 'blue using thoughtful analysis to create valuable content about individual posts.

And in the wake of Facebook's privacy manglings, I think that any FPP featuring a product that does nothing more than aggregate the data long trail of an individual should think about the implications for privacy violations, especially since we've seen companies we've thought to trust (Google, Facebook, etc.) go off and sell our data in ways we thought were verboten.

Despite the OAuth usage, the fact is that unlike a banking transaction, unscrupulous individuals don't need to actually 'access' the account, but could easily just scrape the email list / birthdays / addresses and viola, have instant identity theft material.
posted by kurosawa's pal at 8:32 AM on November 2, 2010

liza, actually no. Because usability and user-centric development tend to sit more toward the interaction design of things, and installing your own copy of the software on your own server has little to do with the user experience, unless you're talking about the installation.

What gist is doing is feeding off of the multitude of data sources you're referring to as being rhizomatic. facebook, gmail, and the like having their own copies of your contact lists is pretty much the textbook definition of rhizomatic in that each is self-sufficient but works as a decentralized network when they want to get data from their peers. If each person had their own server, that's monolithic.
posted by mikeh at 8:33 AM on November 2, 2010

I use a Palm Pre - and a main feature of the excellent WebOS is just this kind of contacts management. It links contacts from gmail, facebook, outlook, and anything else I ask it to do. Very handy.
posted by cubby at 8:37 AM on November 2, 2010

kurosawa's pal: " I think that any FPP featuring a product that does nothing more than aggregate the data long trail of an individual should think about the implications for privacy violations"

Why? So you don't have to think for yourself? What are the comments for then - a mixture of "cool post bro'" and "OP, you suck"? If there are issues to discuss, surely this is exactly the place to do it, not to derail it with "Why didn't you do all the work for me, wah wah wah?!"

kurosawa's pal: "Despite the OAuth usage, the fact is that unlike a banking transaction, unscrupulous individuals don't need to actually 'access' the account, but could easily just scrape the email list / birthdays / addresses and viola, have instant identity theft material."

Which, in itself, is no different from Google Contacts, which has all that same information...

cubby: "I use a Palm Pre - and a main feature of the excellent WebOS is just this kind of contacts management. It links contacts from gmail, facebook, outlook, and anything else I ask it to do. Very handy."

Yeah, my N900 does the same. I guess what I really liked about gist was the aggregating of RSS feeds and other new sources relating to contacts. (In the interests of balance, yes, I know I could set up an RSS reader and track down everyone's RSS feeds to do the same thing.)
posted by benzo8 at 8:56 AM on November 2, 2010

My PalmPre (which I now loathe with the fire of a trillion exploding suns) does exactly this, and I must say it's kind of nice. However, it's also nice knowing that at any moment I could take my PalmPre and crush it with a medium-sized rock.

do you hear me, PalmPre? At any moment.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 9:09 AM on November 2, 2010

liza, actually no. Because usability and user-centric development tend to sit more toward the interaction design of things, and installing your own copy of the software on your own server has little to do with the user experience, unless you're talking about the installation.

Except for the user experience of knowing where my software is, who administers it, and what legal framework it sits under, all of which were questions that rendered enthusiasm for Wave an irrelevant point at my place of employment.
posted by rodgerd at 11:16 AM on November 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Most certainly. I was probably approaching it from a more traditional standpoint and not viewing corporate interactions as that part of the experience. When you're a software developer, data stewardship is... on the other end of things, to say the least.
posted by mikeh at 12:38 PM on November 2, 2010

@mikeh : c'mon. we already have rhizomatic systems with OAuth and OpenID. Drupal's login system pre-dates OpenID and identi.ca was created on basis of creating a federated microblogging system. that's btw, what supposedly Diaspora is looking to do too. and last, but not least, creating a node of identity and social graph management on your server is what Vendor Relations Management systems is all about.

a node is not a monolith. my server, my node, would give me control over how i connect to the system. that's what OAuth is supposed to be, right? needless to say, having the ability to run it on my server would not only create redundancy of my data; it would also "raise the stakes" about who owns my data.

i want services and/or software that understand i own my identity, that i am not just data to them. i want services to understand they are entering in an informational partnership with me; not that am here as a sheep so they can exploit my information, my life, my friends, my relationships and make money out of it w/o me seeing not only a cent but who they are selling my information to.

until that day, none of these companies are worth it. i checked it and used it to see what it was all about because as a online communications technology consultant it is my homework. but am deleting my shit ASAP from it.

GIST is really a Facebook/Google wanna be when it comes to privacy and personal data. we already have too many asshole companies to contend with that have to deal with a new one that has so obviously create vague promises so they can break them the moment they $$$ee the opportunity.
posted by liza at 1:27 PM on November 2, 2010

Yeah, why layer another privacy policy onto my online life?

I've long thought the industry should split up (or would naturally do so) into profile providers and network providers. Maybe Diaspora can be that, but there's probably too much money in FB-likes for anything federated to really get traction.
posted by rhizome at 2:44 PM on November 2, 2010

Hey, Gist employee here. These aren't the officially endorsed positions of Gist or anything, just my perspective.

Whenever we demo Gist to people, it seems half of them have an "ew, creepy" reaction, and half of them say "omg, awesome". My own "omg, awesome", reaction didn't come until I'd been working here for about six months. I had an experimental version of our Gmail client running while I was trying to buy a chair on craigslist. One of the sellers contacted me and, whereas before she would have just been an anonymous email, now I suddenly had her picture, twitter, blog, and Amazon wishlist all in one place. It's no more information than I could have found by googling her email address, but Gist did it for me and presented it.

We really don't want to disturb anyone's privacy. But if you have a twitter account or blog that you associate with your real name or email address, we'd like to make it easier for people to find you. Think of it as free advertising. We very much don't want to be the next facebook or twitter - we want to be a layer that sits on top of them (and whatever's next) and helps you find and organize everything.

In thinking about this, one important difference between us and facebook occurred to me. With Facebook, you're the product - they make money by selling your information to advertisers. Our monetization plan is to sell subscriptions, priced based on the number of contacts we track for you and the amount of work we do. So with us, you're the customer, not the product.

Anyway, Gist is a really fun company to work for. We regularly invite users in the Seattle area to come in and offer feedback. We're also hiring. Thanks for the post, benzo8. If you'd like to learn more about Gist, please feel free to Mefi mail me and I'll put you in contact with the right people.
posted by heathkit at 9:05 PM on November 2, 2010

We very much don't want to be the next facebook or twitter - we want to be a layer that sits on top of them (and whatever's next) and helps you find and organize everything.

So the next Plaxo, then?
posted by rhizome at 12:06 PM on November 5, 2010