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Challenging Dunbar: Gist.

Posted on 19. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Interesting Facts

A known principle in the social relationship science is the Dunbar’s number.  Dunbar was a British anthropologist who theorized that, because of our cognitive limits, we can maintain only a limited number of relationships, in which we really know who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. The number after which you become socially numb (or dumb) was identified to be 150.

In our hyper-connected society, even the most socially inept has a network bigger than 150 “contacts”. But keeping up with all of them is becoming a nightmare and a challenge for businesses where each contact has a very measurable dollar value.

Well, things might change soon!  This past week, a new service opened its beta to the public: Gist.

Gist is an online service that connects your inbox to the web.  It pulls information about your email contacts and the companies they work for from around 50,000 news sites and 20 million blogs and is supported by Microsoft Outlook, Gmail and now even Salesforce. Once you have set up your Gist account, it automatically creates a personal dossier for each of your email contacts using this information with a list of your most recent correspondence, along with any attachments or links relevant for only that person.  You can see any recent blog entries or real-time Tweets from that person in the same window!

True, all of this information is already out there, somewhere. But Gist pulls it all together in a useful manner so that it becomes more actionable. Your contacts are also ranked by an algorithm that looks at different factors. But you can easily change the rating or play with it on an as needed basis (increase the rating if you need to keep an eye on someone for a while, decrease it if you’re not that interested anymore).

Besides the web interface, Gist can also be integrated right into Outlook and Salesforce. The Outlook integration is done via a plugin which pops up a separate window for the contact you are interested into.

Gist said that it is planning to launch an iPhone application in the fourth quarter. The 15-person startup, which is based in Seattle, received $6.75 million in Series A funding in May, led by Foundry Group.

Tags: Personal Contact Management