Xobni vs. Gist- Battle of the Contact Resource Managers
Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 10:55AM | Permalink Synchronization is not always about keeping the same data up-to-date in multiple locations, it's also about staying organized and staying informed. This can be quite difficult when you're juggling several different sources including, but not limited to:
- Your e-mail Inbox and address book
- Your smartphone's Inbox and address book
- Facebook and LinkedIn profiles
- Facebook and LinkedIn status updates
- Twitter feeds
- etc.
As you can imagine, this can make it quite chaotic trying to keep track of all your contacts, including, but not limited to:
- who is doing what
- when was the last time I spoke with person
- how frequently do I communicate with them
- how often do they update their status
In an effort to help us bring order to this chaos, a new industry for Contact Resource Management (CRM) has rapidly grown to give us a one-glance overview in a centralized location. Services such as Xobni and Gist are attempting to produce easily digestable statistical data from these multiple resources based on your contacts':
- status updates
- social networking profiles
- avatar pictures
- e-mail addresses
- phone numbers
- emails correspondence with them
- etc.
They then take that data, and combine it with your Address Book into their own version of a Contact List.
In all honesty, I haven't had a need to actually "use" it yet, but I can see where it would be advantageous for individuals heavy into networking and/or have a huge contact/client list to keep track of. So, at the very least, for testing purposes (or maybe curiosity) I signed up for the Blackberry Beta testing a couple weeks ago and finally got my invite last week. After playing around with it, I honestly can say that I was not impressed, but I can understand why this service/product has become so popular.
Over the next couple of blog entries, I'm going to be comparing these two services (Xobni and Gist). I hope you'll stay along for the ride....
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