geeky

keeping track of your social network

I sent out a “HELP?” tweet last week hoping that someone could help me find a solution to this conundrum:

How do I keep track of all of my friends/acquaintances/contacts online in a neat and orderly fashion? Can I link up their twitter account to their facebook and their blog and real address and not get lost in a world of bad contact records? Anyone? Anyone?

No one shouted back, so I wasn’t sure where to go. I have been using Plaxo since 2002, which was originally so revolutionary and wonderful but became useless and cumbersome in recent years. I could sorta kinda make it do what I needed, but not really.

So I started googling random terms to try and see what I could find. That’s when a term popped up that I vaguely remembered: Gist. Hadn’t I heard that before? But where from? Hmm…  Let’s enter it in my gmail search and see if I’ve signed up for it… Oh yeah, I had! Back in 2009!

Yup. I had signed up for the answer long ago and just never used it. Silly me.

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Anyhow, if you’d like to stop and take a moment to organize all of the people in your real and online life, gist.com just might be your answer. You can merge contacts between facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc. and suddenly when you look at someone’s information you have it all compiled in one place.

I’m happy that I now have one place to enter in all of the information about my friends, family, online pals, and more… and it’s dynamic and updates me when things change! Plus, I can tag and categorize everyone as well, so I can pull up my “UCLA” and “Catalina” contacts just as quickly as my “Weddingbee” ones.

Please excuse me while I go and clean and organize my newest address book…