Connected aims to beat Gist at contact management

Sachin Rekhi of Connected emailed about his contact management tool. Rekhi says Connected is a direct competitor with Gist.

Like Gist, Connected pulls data from your online accounts. It works with email and social media sites like Twitter or Facebook.

And like Gist it builds a single, online contact book.

The interface is cleaner than Gist’s. Connected’s organisational tools are simpler and more straight-forward. This is helpful. While I found Gist useful at first, it quickly became overwhelming as I added more and more contacts who use social media and other online services. Connected doesn’t feel like sitting in front of a firehose.

I used to think Gist controlled the flood of incoming messages. Now I let most whiz past and focus only on key in boxes – mainly old school email and Twitter direct messages.

Connected is more about the contact book than the social media feed. This focus is its strength, it could quick become your first port of call for sifting through hundreds of contacts.

Feeding contact data into Connected is simple. You simply grant it access to the accounts you’d like to include. I tested it with Gmail, Twitter and Facebook. I could have added LinkedIn or any one of dozens of other online services.

There’s a go-away-and-make-a-cup-of-tea lag while Connected hunts down the contacts and pulls them into its database.

However I won’t use Connected as my online main contact book because the price is not realistic. At US$9.99 a month it’s a lot of money for performing a straightforward task. Sure Connected is an improvement on the free Google Contacts application, but compared with Gist, which is also still free, ten American dollars is too expensive.

And anyway, I haven’t bothered to use Gist in months. I don’t find the free application useful. I don’t really use Google Contacts either. It just sits there in the background. I used Outlook’s contacts manager when I used Outlook for email – but I’ve no plan to return there.

The world still needs an online contact book which can deliver Outlook’s contact manager features, but simply.