I’ve been participating in the private beta for Gist and have many good things to say about the product but to simply say that finally there is a product that brings your inbox together with web content and activity streams is huge. What Friendfeed did for social networks Gist can do for email and it is beyond question that the email marketplace is several orders of magnitude larger than social networks, now and in the future.

What do I like about Gist? In a nutshell the fact that it is a cloud based service as opposed to something I have to download and install means two things. First, I am not frozen out if I use Gmail (which I do) instead of Exchange and secondly I can expect the service to expand faster than an on premise solution in terms of the range of content services enabled. I also appreciate that I have to manage very little in terms of profile and settings in order to make it work, Gist is very good at determining the appropriate settings for external content.

The Gist team has done a lot with a very small team and what we are seeing with the evolving product is essentially the realization of social CRM as a category. Not only can I quickly see previous correspondence and profile data for a contact – my real social graph – but I can also see what that person is publishing, which speaks directly to their interests and perspectives.

There is so much to appreciate in this service that I think it’s best to stop writing and send you over to Gist.com to signup for your own account, you won’t be disappointed.