Like most people I have more than one email address. I’ve got a business address on Lotus, a personal POP mail on my own domain, an address for an organization I do volunteer work for and several other Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail addresses. Apart from that I also have Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and all of these mailboxes and social network accounts hold vital information about my network in the form of contacts, addresses, phone numbers, blogs, tweets and links. The big problem: its all scattered.

Some information, like the social updates on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook I already managed centrally by using Yoono, a great tool to get an overview of your social networks activities but that doesn’t fix my need for actual contact information in the context of my mail

That was, until I installed GIST this weekend. I love it! For the first time I have all of my contacts from all the different accounts in one overview (GIST Dashboard). Address information is coupled with updates on social networks, mails exchanged, Blog updates and company information. I can merge information from different sources to really create a powerful profile for the contacts I have. Very nice indeed but as a website dashboard still somewhat distant from my day to day use which really still is based around the mail.

That’s where the Lotus Notes plug-in comes in. Sitting in the sidebar of my Lotus client it shows me all the info (the so called ‘Gist’) contained in my various networks about the senders/recipients of the mail I just clicked. It shows the contacts information from the address books, updates on twitter LinkedIn and Facebook, additional addresses and blogs they might have. All at your fingertips!

Now the Notes plug-in is still in Beta and I can see why. Uploading my notes information has been running since last Friday and still isn’t completed and it sometimes seems to get stuck in an upload. I also see other things that hopefully will be changed but for a first version it still is really neat and I’m already making good use of it.

I would definitely give it a thumbs up!