Thanks for the write-up and mention of Gist. Here are a few clarifications;

• with regard to security, Gist is highly flexible in what a user supplies to the system. Users can start simply by just entering people/companies by hand (most secure, least automatic) or connect to a public list (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) for a semi-automatic list of people and companies, or they can choose to connect to an inbox (Gmail, Outlook, Outlook) and upload only message headers (names of people and related companies) or for the most automated and fully-featured experience they can connect to their “full inbox”. At any time, the user can delete and specific account and/or their whole account and all data will be removed. We take privacy and security seriously and therefore want to give the users lots of control and full visibility.

• wrt to data polling and “speed”- yes, we are still in private beta and we do proactively look for data every 24 hours, but if you open a “person detail page” we do fetch data in real time for that contact or company. We do have plans to increase the polling frequency as we move closer to a production release.

• wrt to your NBA people issues – we usually only look up people where we have both a name and an associated company. While this is not 100% accurate, it is usually pretty good. If your friend has a generic email address (e.g. @gmail.com) we default to “not watching for news” to avoid this problem and prompt the user to a) give us a company name to use or b) to turn on news watch and deal with the conflicts. We do have some designs that will help in the future (look for “bob smith” and NOT “NBA” or AND “seattle”) which is another way to slice this problem, so look for these in the near future.

The WWD readers are good, early adopters, so we are look forward to working with them to make these and other improvements soon. Keep the ideas, and criticism, coming as it is the best way to improve the service.

Best,

T.A. McCann (founder and CEO) of Gist