Gist. The next big thing?!?

OK, I am going to go out on a limb here, and say that "I" discovered the next big thing.  OK, I didn't discover it, but at least I am fortunate enough to be an earlier adopter.  What am I talking about?  Let me give you the Gist of it...

While attending the Forrester IT Forum in Las Vegas, NV last week, I met a gentleman named T.A. McCann. T.A. is the Founder and CEO of a company called Gist.  As he told me about the company, I couldn't help but think that he was really onto something. 

You see, Gist is an application that pulls in information about all the people and companies you know.  Gist can pull data from Outlook, GMail, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc. and then feed it back to you in a single interface.  That type of aggregation is nothing new.  What sets it apart, however, is that Gist algorithmically rates all this data to provide contextual information that is most important to you.

Here is a short interview that I recorded with T.A. using my new Sony Bloggie video camera:

I knew I was already onto something based on my brief interaction with both T.A. and the Gist application.  However, in my mind, this was confirmed when I saw I wasn't the only one interviewing T.A. In fact, social media giant Robert Scoble posted a video interview with T.A. just a week prior while they were both attending at Google I/O. 

You can use the Gist application through its web interface as well as through its app for the iPhone or Android phones.

Douglas J. Haider is a Wireless Consulting Engineer with Xirrus. He hosts a personal blog at WiFiJedi.com, and micro-blogs on Twitter @wifijedi