For those of you that are regular readers, you know how excited I am about Gist, an investment we made earlier this year. On Tuesday Gist launched their open beta program making Gist available to everyone.
The coverage of the launch was extensive with articles describing how Gist works and what it is useful for in sites including GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Forbes, Mashable, Cnet, eWeek, NetworkWorld, WebWorkerDaily, TechFlash, and Microsoft StartupZone. Some of my favorite articles were FilltheFunnel (hint – iPhone screenshots) and MarketingProfessor (hint – what they like, what they don’t like – much of which is on the product roadmap.)
On a phone call with the Gist team last week, I reminded them that they only get to “open up to the world once”. The company has been operating under a “closed beta” since we invested as they simultaneously built out the product functionality while insuring that their architecture scaled up to handle a huge amount of data (which it is already.)
I’m super impressed by the Gist team – this is a gang that knows how to build and ship software. At my first meeting, they put the date of 9/15/09 on the board for the launch of the service. Over the last 60 days, they’ve been obsessed with performance, functionality, the first time user experience, and software quality. I think they should be incredibly proud of what they’ve launched.
While this is still a very early step in the business, it’s an important one. The Q4 roadmap is very full and – if the last six months is an indicator – will be filled with many steady releases of new functionality to the service.
I use Gist every day and have found it to be immensely helpful when tightly integrated into my work and information flow. I encourage all of you to give it a try and give me as much feedback as you are willing to give as we try to extend it to be useful to all business professionals.