It is a cool new “Relationship Manager” that recently launched publicly in beta. Gist is not for casual users, rather, it’s a one-of-its-kind service for professional users that bridges key gaps between other popular services. For personal use, you should checkout Life.IO.

What is Gist?

Gist aims to help you control information overload by focusing on people and companies that are important to you. First, Gist gets information from your inbox and social networking accounts to build a database of your network. It then monitors the web for information about the people and companies in your network. Using the concept of “importance”, it then provides customizable views of people and companies, showing you news, blog posts, tweets, etc. for each of them. Your Dashboard becomes a “intelligent reader” thus giving you insight into critical updates that are important to you.

Get Started By Connecting Accounts

Gist allows you to connect a variety of sources using built-in business networking techniques to build your network database. At present, you can integrate your email from Outlook, Gmail or any service that supports IMAP. Your professional contacts can come from LinkedIn, Salesforce, or any CSV file. Note that Gist doesn’t connect with LinkedIn at present, hence you need to export and import your LinkedIn contacts.

Social networking contacts can be imported from Facebook and Twitter. Gist also offers an Outlook plug-in so that you can use it from within Outlook. To use Gist effectively, you will need to personalize it as described later in this article, but first let’s look at the powerful views Gist offers.

Dashboard View

The Dashboard is your top-level view to get all the news about your network. It is a RSS news feed reader, Twitter client, and Calendar rolled into one, with optional widgets showing shared links and attachments received in your email inbox.

You can customize the Dashboard to show Recent News, or news from people you’ve recently contacted or added. Information displayed can be filtered by date, content source, importance and tags. You can search to quickly find people, companies, attachments, or shared links.

You can also share any information item from your Dashboard to Facebook or Twitter. In this way, Gist goes beyond an “intelligent reader” to being a “intelligent networking” tool.

People and Companies View

The People and Companies tabs organize your contacts according to importance. It shows your email history and stats, the last time you were in contact, number of contacts from a company, and so on, for each person and company in your network.

You can search to find and manage contacts, or add new contacts manually. You can sort the view using any of the column headers, and use tags to filter the view. For each person or company, you can edit their names, add tags, and adjust their importance. You can merge duplicates, and use multi-select to perform bulk operations. Finally, you can instruct Gist whether to Watch a person or contact for news updates.

Profile View

Gist Profile pages are a central place to find out everything about the people and companies in your network. Gist scans your email accounts, calendars, contact databases such as LinkedIn, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter, to create unified profiles for each person or company. Gist is continuously searching for new information about your contacts even when you’re not using it.

The What’s New section pulls blog posts, tweets, and news from thousands of sources with sharing and filtering tools. You can flag items, mark them as read, share items via email, Facebook, or Twitter, or dismiss them as not relevant. The right-hand side shows searchable widgets such as aggregated conversations, shared links and attachments. Shared Contacts shows related people with links to their profiles. There is even a Google Search widget pre-populated with search results that can be customized with your own search term.

Profile information can be manually edited and updated. If the Gist profile doesn’t have it already, you can add a relevant image, website, phone number, address, and tags. The best way to organize your contacts is to use tags. Finally, a cool Dossier feature provides a printable version of a profile that you can use before meeting or communicating with a person.

Optimize To Get The Most Out Of Gist

After initially building your Gist contacts network, I recommend that you spend some time tweaking it for your needs. I found this necessary because:

• Gist may not recognize that the person from your LinkedIn network and your friend on Facebook are the same person. In these cases, you will need to Merge them.
• Similarly, Gist may not correctly associate Twitter handles with the contacts from your email inbox.
• Gmail has a rather unconventional approach of adding every email address you send email to, as a contact. To my dismay, this doesn’t work well with Gist, which imports all Gmail contacts. I ended up deleting tons of frivolous help@…, support@…, and info@… kind of “contacts”.
• You may not have had much interaction with influential people who are actually important to you. It appears that Gist’s ranking uses frequency of communication as a benchmark to assess importance, because of which you may need to manually adjust their importance.
• If your Facebook friends are primarily personal friends who work at companies that don’t really matter to you, you will need to either delete or lower their importance in Gist.
• Also, profiles may need to be edited to add individual websites, blog feeds and news sources so that you get relevant information.

Are you excited about Gist using as an intelligent networking tool? Did you like the post? Tell us in the comments!

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Realizing this, a few great applications have come out of the woodwork to make Twitter into a better way to have and follow a conversation. They thread tweets, track replies, and make sure you can understand the whole dialog, rather than just one small and insignificant part.

Here are three of the best ways to keep conversations under control on Twitter:

Twitoaster

Twitoaster is probably the easiest of the bunch to get started with – all you have to do is follow @twitoaster on Twitter. Then, Twitoaster goes to work for you. Every time someone responds to one of your tweets, the conversation is threaded on Twitoaster. You can see the number of replies (a number that’s frequently updated) to a given tweet, as well as see what people said. You can also log in to your Twitter account on Twitoaster, which lets you reply to your replies right from within the conversation.

Twitoaster also offers a couple of cool features – it tracks the number of replies a given account gets, as well as how you rank among Twitoaster users. It’s a full-featured way to track replies, as well as see who’s responding to your tweets.

Tweetree

Tweetree is really two great services in one – it creates conversation threads for replies, and it’s a total overhaul and improvement on the Twitter interface. First, the interface. Tweetree allows you to pull in external content – videos, images, and the like – and experience it directly within Tweetree. It also takes all shortened URLs, and shows where they actually go – a nice touch to avoid RickRolls and the like.

The conversation threading, too, is a great feature of Tweetree. It brings in all conversations you’re a part of on Twitter (even showing the tweets you replied to), and puts them in tree form, nesting the replies throughout the conversation. If you’re getting the “oh, how cool” tweets a lot, or replied about something you can’t remember for the life of you, Tweetree keeps track of it for you. You can do everything in Tweetree you’d want to do in Twitter, and actually a whole lot more.

ThreadedTweets

ThreadedTweets rocks the world of real-time conversation threading. You can sign up for ThreadedTweets without having to give your Twitter password, because it uses Twitter’s OAuth system to authenticate, rather than asking for your password. Once you’re signed in, you’ll get real-time monitoring of all the replies to your tweets, which are threaded into a conversation for you.

ThreadedTweets also keeps a list of Popular conversations, which you can read and view easily. Every conversation has a permalink, which makes it even easier to keep monitored and updated. There’s even an embeddable widget for tracking a conversation on another site – this makes ThreadedTweets both a conversation tool and a real-time search, which is a great combination.

One of Twitter’s best features is its ability to create quick, simple conversations. Twitter itself does a poor job of tracking them and keeping conversations intact, but these four applications do it incredibly well. What’s your favorite way to keep track of your conversations on Twitter?

Oh and make sure to follow MakeUseOf on Twitter as well. We are now going to start using for distributing beta invites to publicly closed websites and giveaway license keys to commercial software (when available).

Photo: respres

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People share thoughts, exchange opinions and reviews every single second. It is really hard to keep track of those conversations and sometimes you just need to.

Would you like to know what people are saying about the recent product or track your business reviews? This time I am listing most useful online tools that might help you to search multiple social media sites from one place (and sometimes with one click).

Spy

Spy (see MakeUseOf review of Spy) is fun to use. It updates in real time and if you are tired of working, you can just sit back and read the updates.

The tool also shows recent trends (as well as hashtags) and allows you to change the page background color:

SamePoint

SamePoint offers to search plenty of social networks. It has a handy interface allowing you to click through the tabs to get more targeted results: social media, microblogging, networks, images, etc. You can also subscribe to any search by RSS to track any changes.

It also offers real time tracking mode:

SocialMention

SocialMention (see MakeUseOf review of SocialMention) offers to search through blogs (Wordpress.com, Google Blog Search, Live.com, Technorati.com, Wikio.com), bookmarks (Diigo, Clipmarks, StumbleUpon), micro-blogs, comments (BackType), images (Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket), news (Digg, Reddit, Mixx), video (Youtube, Truveo.com, Pixsy.com), etc:

It also scores each query based on its social media presence:

WhosTalkin

WhosTalkin is the most comprehensive of all. It is divided into sections that includes blogs, news, networks, videos, images, and forums. Each of the sections has numerous options to click through.

The site also offers to install their Google gadget to bring the power of the social media search to your Google home page.

Of course, there are more social media search tools. I’ve only mentioned those that appeared useful to me.  Which tools are you using and would like to recommend?

Post image by striatic

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Don’t be deceived by the perception that everything you do online appears to be rather unreal or “in game”. All your traces will lead back to you. In the worst case scenario, people you least wish to spot your faults and failures will discover your “other side”. Read on if you’re worried or want to avoid mistakes in the future.

Why you should worry!

Every person with access to the internet knows search engines (e.g. Google) and search engines know you. Search engines naturally collect all the data they can get a hold of. And everyone who knows you may be interested in finding out more about you.

For example your boss or the company you would like to work for or your girlfriend or that stalker who has a crush on you. What are the things they should rather not know about you? Signing up for a dating website for example is harmless, unless your significant other finds out about it. Worried, yet?

How bad is it?

Ever googled your name or your eMail address? Instead of Google you may also try Spock, the people search engine. At Spock you can claim your own results, edit or improve your profile and monitor new information coming in.

So what do these searches reveal? Anything your family or a potential employer may find disturbing? Hopefully not!

Guard yourself!

What can you do to protect your privacy?

Set up an alternative disposable eMail address and use fake name generator to browse incognito. That way you can more or less anonymously engage in private activities that should not be discovered by the wrong people.

Obviously, if you’re using a public computer, make sure you erase all your traces, like cookies, browsing history, passwords, cache etc.

Don’t post intimidating pictures on social networks or anywhere else for that matter, you don’t know who may find them.

Generally, the safest way to stay out of trouble is to avoid trouble. Simply act like the sympathetic and professional person you wish to be perceived as. At least when you’re using your vital data.

Be searchable!

Rather than be completely under the radar and remove all personal information about yourself from the web, you should remain searchable! Because what would be more suspicious than fishy information? No information at all!

Take advantage of the system and do use your real name and your main eMail address in the right places. Make sure people will easily find good things when searching for you and don’t make them dig deep.

For example register a domain or sign up with a career website like Xing or LinkedIn. On these sites you can create the profile you want others to see. Feed it with honest facts about yourself and make connections that matter. Don’t be afraid to mention your private online projects, like websites, forums or blogs, if they are safe and may be relevant for a future career.

What to do when it’s too late?

If information has leaked into the World Wide Web that you would have liked to conceal, it’s almost too late. But you may be able to partially revert the leak and hide it. Is your eMail address pointing to an ugly forum? Go there and change your eMail address. Simply go ahead and tackle the search results one after the other and see what data you can change or remove.

Finally, hope that none of the details were cached. If it’s really bad you may want to hire professionals to help remove information from servers and databases.

Just in case your searches have revealed that someone writes libelous things about you, Ryan recently published a great article about How to Remove False Information about Yourself on the Internet. Good luck!

Need tips for browsing anonymously and removing your traces? Search the MUO article base for safer browsing and privacy.

Picture credits: barunpatro, Hardisty

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When you first go to the Monitter site you’ll see three columns that are constantly being updated in real-time with new occurrences of specified keywords. To get started you just simply type three words into the keyword text boxes. Withing seconds of entering your keywords, you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live. If you don’t feel like keeping a tab open within the site, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the keyword(s) that you’re monitoring.

As tweets continue to stream in real-time, you have the option to reply to a tweet or go to the tweeter’s profile. The only downside to the reply feature though is that when clicked, it takes you to the Twitter homepage where you can then reply. In future updates, it would be nice to see a reply box integrated right on the Monitter website.

A great feature that Monitter has implemented is the ability to change back and forth from a light to a dark theme. When you visit the site the default theme is dark which a lot of users don’t like, so it’s nice that they have this option.

As you can see above next to the light/dark link, there’s also the option to hide the informational panel that appears above the columns. As you can see below, the header takes up quite a bit of space so it’s nice to be able to open and close it whenever you need to.

Lastly there’s the Monitter widget that you can embed on any site that allows javascript. In order to use it, you will need to download the necessary files and insert Monitter widget tags (as many as you’d like) on your site. The instructions consist of four short steps and are very simple. Below you’ll see a demo widget.

So now you have yet another way to spy and monitor the Twitter world to see what they’re saying about you, your blog and your keywords.

What do you think? Do you think Monitter is something that you might use on a regular basis?

Charnita is a social media addict & Internet junkie. She blogs about internet & blog tools, website & blog promotion, web 2.0 & social media at her Social Web Tools blog.

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Considering the huge information overflow online, you can have some excellent tools which help you to effectively organize the information flow and help you stay informed and up to date everyday. Let’s take a look at some of them.

1. RSS

RSS or feeds as we like to call them is an amazing technology which lets you stay updated with various websites, blogs and journals in one place – your feed reader – which could be Google Reader, FeedDemon or any other one. We at Make Use Of love RSS and have published lots of posts up to now for RSS addicts. Do a search for “RSS” in our search engine and you’ll get all of them.

Assuming that most of the readers of this site already know all about RSS, those who’ve heard this term for the first time today (yes, believe it or not, RSS hasn’t gone mainstream yet ) should start making use of this technology immediately.

2. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is one of the most useful services by Google, especially for those who care to stay informed online. Through Google Alerts you can monitor a specific term or phrase and check what people are saying about it. Read more about it here.

3. MonitorThis

MonitorThis is an effective online reputation management tool which lets you subscribe to 20 different search engine feeds at the same time, for a particular search term. It includes all the main search engines including Delicious tag search and Flickr tag search.

4. Memes

Memes on the internet aggregate the information which quickly spreads from one blog/website to the other and present them in a river of news format. There are various such meme websites, the most famous of them being Techmeme, which aggregates the latest tech news from around the web. There is also RSSmeme which aggregates what people are sharing in their RSS readers.

5. DailyMe

I wrote an elaborate post on DailyMe sometime back and I think that it’s certainly one of the best personalized news aggregators available online which also boasts some nice features like the newspaper reading format.

6. FaveBot

FaveBot works like Google Alerts and lets you track your favorite keywords online. It allows you to monitor through various categories like blogs, books, DVD’s, events, music , podcasts, pictures and videos.

7. Twitter And Friendfeed

Both Twitter and Friendfeed, apart from from being cool ways to communicate and be social, also serve as a way to get the latest information about various events and happenings from all around the world.

Twitter also has its own version of Google Alerts called TweetBeep which alerts you via email when someone mentions a keyword on Twitter which you’ve flagged for attention.

What online tools do you use to organize your information flow and stay informed and up to date? Let us know in the comments!

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

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