Gist, Plaxo and Xobni all aim to cut through the social media cloud and pull together a comprehensive digital address book.

Although each tool has its pluses, none has a magic formula making it the must-have contact manager organiser.

Gist filters your various in-boxes and delivers incoming messages in a single place. Its strong point is sorting things in a rough order of importance. It works with email, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook. Gist doesn’t always get this right, but it’s an improvement on the usual overloaded in-box.

Gist is free at the time of writing.

Plaxo does a reasonable job of synching to contact management applications. It can also pull in some of your social networking messages.

Plaxo is free, but you need to buy the premium service to synch with Microsoft Outlook and mobile phones. My Plaxo account is full of duplicate entries – annoyingly you can only merge these if you pay for the premium version.

Xobni looks good, but it’s an Outlook add-on and doesn’t replace the contact manager. It provides better index cards and links entries so you can quickly find a contact’s colleagues.

Google’s contact management tool – part of Gmail – is second rate. It provides little information and adds no value.

Of the three tools looked at here, I recommend Gist as a way to cut through the noise. But for now, Outlook remains the smartest contact manager.

Rapportive is a Gmail add-on. It shows information about the person who sent an email. Think of it as a basic CRM system.

The data replaces Gmail's right-hand advertising panel – which won't endear Rapportive to Google.

There's a similarity to Xobni, which works with Microsoft Outlook. But Rapportive is lighter. Xobni runs on your PC, while Rapportive lives in the cloud.

Rapportive pulls information from social media accounts linked to the person's email. This means the results are variable. I've noticed plenty of information and even photographs for some of my contacts, but for many there is nothing.

I've written before about Xobni and about Gist, which is a more complex, variation on the same theme. I prefer Gist to Xobni.

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.

While the latest upgrades to Xobni give Outlook another shot in the arm, they underline the shortcomings of desktop email. Giving up on Outlook and moving to Gmail may be a better option.

Xobni ( inbox backwards) turns everyday email into a relationship management tool by focusing on people and not messages.

The program is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in. It sits on top of the application and digs into Outlook’s data, slicing and dicing it to emphasis your links with contacts.

Xobni’s toolbar occupies the right hand side of Outlook’s main display providing contact information about the person who sent the incoming message.

You’ll see the person’s name at the top of the Xobni pane along with their photo if you’ve stored one in your Outlook Contacts. You’ll also find statistics on your communications with them and a rank – so you’ll know something about that person’s relative importance to you.

If there is a phone number anywhere in the messages or contact details, it’ll be shown – it’s clickable. Likewise a link allows you to quickly schedule a calendar appointment with that person.

Xobni shows recent conversations and email threads between you and the person in question along with clickable links to any attachments that have travelled between you. There are also improvements to Outlook search – though Microsoft’s updated desktop search nullifies the value of this.

Xobni's instant productivity pay-off

On their own, none of these features are earth-shattering; together they deliver an instant productivity payoff. You’ll find you won’t need to switch between your messages and contact database – that’s a time saver in itself. You’ll also need to run fewer searches – just about everything relevant to an email is quickly to hand.

Some of Xobni’s features seem advanced. For example, the program does a good job of figuring out when someone uses more than one email address and lumping all their messages together. Another neat trick is the way it mines emails for the names of other people in your contact database, then displays them in a clickable form.

Xobni isn’t just about improved productivity; it also delivers a fresh people-oriented way of looking at information allowing you to build better relationships.

So why am I not convinced by Xobni?

I used Xobni for a few months when it first appeared this time last year. While the application looks good and can boost productivity for some users, I found it didn't me in any practical way. If anything, Xobni reports are a distraction. They are pretty to look at and interesting at first – but that’s about it.

What’s more, Gmail has improved to the point where its now perverse for a person working alone to prefer Outlook. Ironically, Gmail’s weakness is the way it handles people. If Xobni worked with Gmail, the developers would have a killer product on their hands.

Finally, Xobni slows Outlook down and on occasion stops it from working — albeit temporarily.

Xobni makes sense if you work for a company where you have to use Outlook, live in Outlook and the support policy is liberal enough to allow you to install it.

To me Xobni is the chrome plated hub caps and giant tail fins on those beautiful, but dinosaur-like American cars from the 1960s in an era when we’re all driving more practical Toyotas. It an anachronism.