Gist

» see gist.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Gist came out of Seattle in 2008, built by T.A. McCann, who had spent years in Microsoft's Exchange Server group. The pitch rested on one observation: your professional network already existed, lying around in your mail and your calendar, and nobody had ever bothered to collect it. Gist read the inbox and ranked everyone in it by how much you actually corresponded with them, without asking you to type in a single name.

Then it did the part that made it interesting. For every person on that list it went and found their company news and whatever they had just published, so that clicking a contact gave you a briefing instead of an email address. It ran as a website and as a plugin that lived inside Outlook and Gmail, and it raised $10.8 million, with the first money coming from Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital. In 2010 it bought Learn That Name, a small LinkedIn-based game for drilling yourself on who your own contacts were.

Research In Motion bought the company on 14 February 2011 and did not say what it paid. For a year RIM left the service alone, and gist.com kept running as if nothing had happened. Then on 15 August 2012 the notice went up: registrations closed immediately, and the service had until 15 September. The team was going to spend its time on BlackBerry 10 instead.

Turkey was not BlackBerry country. The handset was a corporate object here, issued by a few banks and multinationals, and the phone a working engineer in Ankara actually carried in 2011 was running something else. Gist was built for a person whose professional identity arrived through a company mail server. In Turkey in 2011 that described a fairly small number of people.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what RIM actually bought ~

The acquisition was never really about gist.com. RIM wanted the contact-resolution engine, the part that could take a mess of addresses and signatures and decide that four of them were the same human being. That was supposed to become the BlackBerry 10 address book, where every contact card would carry your recent mail with that person alongside whatever they had said publicly.

It shipped. BlackBerry 10 arrived in January 2013 with exactly that feature, and almost nobody saw it, because by then the platform was selling to a shrinking set of people who had not yet left. McCann stayed through the transition and then went back to starting companies.

~ the dossier problem ~

Gist was early to something that later became ordinary and slightly uncomfortable. Assembling a file on everyone you email, automatically, and presenting it as a convenience is now the standard behavior of sales software, and it is sold on exactly the argument Gist used in 2009. The difference is that Gist offered it to you about your own correspondents, as a memory aid, rather than to a sales team about strangers.

Xobni was doing a version of the same thing in the Outlook sidebar and got bought by Yahoo, and Rapportive did it in Gmail and got bought by LinkedIn. Neither survived its acquirer as a product either, which suggests the feature was always worth more to a platform than the company around it was worth on its own.

~ thirteen kilobytes to nothing ~

The archive has the whole arc in byte counts. On 22 July 2012 gist.com was still a full marketing site, around thirteen kilobytes of screenshots and copy about never missing an update. By 17 August, two days after the notice, the same address returned a bare shell: a copyright line reading 2007 to 2012, and under it the word "Welcome!" with nothing behind it. That stub was still being captured in November, and then the crawler stopped finding anything worth recording for two years.

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