Good riddance to Google Wave.

I never understood what the fuss was about.

Wave may have been clever programming, but it didn't do anything other applications already did better. In fact Google has better tools for most Wave tasks.

It did instant messaging although Google already had one and a half tools that do the same job very well.

Wave did communications. Why bother when Gmail is so much better?

Wave was a collaboration tool. Who needs that when collaborating on Google Docs is so easy?

There was a social media twist to Wave, but Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are all simpler to use and way more polished.

Wave had a bad user interface and was difficult to use.

More importantly, it was difficult to understand what was going on and what one was supposed to do.

Plaxo is part social media tool, part address book. It is useful for keeping contacts names and addresses up-to-date.

Useful, but not as elegant or as handy as alternatives such as Linkedin.

Plaxo has a chequered history. In the early days Plaxo messages would turn up in my email all the time. They looked like spam and were annoying. The company climbed aboard the cluetrain and the unpleasant stuff stopped.

While Plaxo needs to make money – don't we all? I'm not sure the company's current approach will work. It certainly doesn't work for me.

Plaxo operates a so-called "Freemium" business model. The basic product is free, if you want to do more with the tools you have to pay. In theory it is a good business model and there are many cases where it works well.

I've recently come across three ways Plaxo aims to get money from me. I don't think I'd pay for any of these:

1. Outlook sync. This was free, with a paid-for version allowing more features. Now sync is part of Plaxo Premium and costs US$60 a year – around a NZ$100.
2. Then there's Plaxo Pro available in three versions; Basic, Plus and Power. The Power version is a whopping US$250 a month and essentially provides you with a way to spam Plaxo members. It includes Premium.
3. Then there are e-cards, basically electronic birthday cards and similar stationary at a cost of US$20 a year.

You can forget the e-cards. Why would I ever want to pay US$20 to send them?

I've no need or inclination to spam people, which rules out Plaxo Pro.

Which brings us to Plaxo Premium – paying for support is fair enough. Paying for the ability to back-up is reasonable. Paying to remove duplicates is a bit on the nose, but we'll let that go. I can't use the sync to Windows Mobile and I used the Sync to Outlook when it was free and was not overly impressed.

Plaxo is an OK online address book. It's not a useful to me as Facebook or Linkedin. It has around 15 million users – Linkedin has 43 million, mainly business oriented users, Facebook has 300 million.

Which one of those is the most valuable? Certainly not Plaxo.

Gist cuts through the deluge of incoming email, tweets and other messages. It sorts, highlights and presents your most important material in a simple format.

After one day of using the application I can see it has potential. It may become a lynch-pin. But I'm not yet  convinced I'll use it over the long-term. Here's why:

Gist works with Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook inboxes, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Salesforce. The software is a free web-delivered or cloud application. There's a paid subscription version in the pipeline.

Like Xobni, Gist digs through your past emails and organises information, appointments and correspondence. Unlike Xobni it pulls together a range of information sources. That's smart, email is only one of a number of information channels most people deal with.

Gist displays data on a dashboard where you can quickly see what the software decides is your most important messages. You can also view the information by the contact name.

Gist analyses your contacts then ranks them based on the number of communications with each person. The idea is to help you automatically filter out noise and focus on the most significant material.

Gist simplifies

In practice, it works, but only up to a point.

Here's what it does well:

• Gist does a great job of pulling together incoming material from different sources. I'm testing it with Gmail, Twitter and LinkedIn. Between the three I may have hundreds of incoming messages each day — in fact these are mainly tweets. Putting them all in one place is helpful.
• My contacts have been automatically ordered in a league table, with the most important at the top. The list is good, but it's not perfect. The people I'm working with are all on the first page, but there are people on the page who I don't know well.
  And I'm not impressed to see Gist's TA McCann as my most important contact.
• I don't use Salesforce and I haven't yet tried Gist with Outlook so I feel a bit of a fraud for including this under the what Gist does well heading, but the software appears integrate smoothly with these applications – which will certainly make it a powerful option for those people using either product.

Here's what's not so great:

• While Gist is good at deciding who your most important contacts are, it can't decide which material from those contacts is the most important. In my industry there's a lot of chatter on Twitter and the occasional gem. Material from LinkedIn contacts is important but not vital, but most incoming emails are vital. I'd like to tell Gist to give incoming email more weight than tweets – perhaps I can do this and I just haven't found out how, it's only been on my machine for 24 hours.
• I still feel deluged. It's easier to get at some of the important material. I could use Gist instead of Tweetdeck. And it's a better way of checking out LinkedIn updates than the RSS feed I use. But Gist is probably not going to replace my email inbox soon.

Better than Xobni

The headline says Gist is better than Xobni. The last time I looked Xobni only worked with Outlook, although it can pull personal information from Facebook and LinkedIn. Gist adds Gmail and Twitter putting it way out in front.

Xobni integrates with Outlook, but the composite screen is cramped on my desktop display and hard to view on my laptop. Gist on the other hand is browser-based (although there are integrated versions) and is easier to read.

Lastly, I found Xobni was slow to use and I suspected it slowed down Outlook as well – although I couldn't quantify this.

You can Twitter all you like. Poke half the world on Facebook. And polish your Linkedin profile until its buttons shine. But according to Jason Falls, social media activity on its own won't find you a job.

He says if you're seriously looking for employment, you need to get out and meet people or, at least, get on the phone.

Falls is right. We all know that. But two things make his point valuable.

• First, he offers his own personal story as evidence.
• Second, Falls is a director of social media and his view was published on his Social Media Explorer web site.

Why Social Media Won't Get You Hired In A Recession.

What's really killing newspapers: They're no longer the best providers of social currency. – By Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine.

Jack Shafer believes newspapers (and for that matter talk radio stations) are dying because Facebook does a better job of providing people with social currency.