After publicly swooning over Gist, I finally got my Gist invite yesterday! What a treat! I wanted to share a few quick first impressions.

First impression is that this is really, really cool. I put in a couple key bits of information (my Facebook auth and my Twitter name [@donortools]), and it started sucking down my friends and followers (doesn’t that make me sound cool). After a while it had imported all my contacts, and put together a sort of aggregate “wall” for each.

Since many of my contacts were from Twitter, many have just their tweets in their contact wall. For example, I follow Guy Kawasaki, and since he doesn’t know I exist all I have on his wall is his prolific list of recent tweets. This is minorly useful, but I think it will start to get a lot more informative after I hook in more services and provide more detail about my contacts. However, for a few of my contacts I have a lot more information, such as rss feeds and such, which makes their contact record bristle with information.

One of the things I’m hoping for is Apple Mail integration. Currently they have an Outlook plugin, which looks promising but doesn’t work for me as a Mac user. Also, I had a bit of trouble connecting to my Google Apps account. Might have been a PBKAC (Problem Between Keyboard And Chair) error though.

All in all I’m very impressed. They’ve got an awesome service and I can’t wait to see how it develops.