Gist, Plaxo and Xobni: Each has pluses and minuses

Gist, Plaxo and Xobni all aim to cut through your 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 all your in-boxes from various sources neatly putting incoming messages in a single place where you can deal with them more efficiently. Its strong point is sorting things in order of importance. It works with conventional 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 still free at the time of writing.

Plaxo when synching is your goal

Plaxo does a reasonable job of syncing data 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 sync 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. You may find this worthwhile, but for many people it is not a compelling enough feature to justify the expense.

Xobni looks good on the surface, 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. Think of it as tidying up what is already there.

Contrast these three add-on apps with Google’s contact management tool – now part of Gmail – which is second-rate. It provides little information and adds nothing of value. Mind you, it is free.

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