RIM purchases contact manager Gist

TechCrunch has reported that RIM has confirmed the speculation and purchased Gist, the Seattle-based contact management software.

Gist organizes your professional contacts from disparate places like email, IM, social networks and mobile devices and sorts them in one place. It gives users the latest news, blog posts, and tweets for these contacts, and even updates their contact info automatically.

Also, Gist can give you briefings about your contacts, and provide you with content produced by and about your contacts in addition to their profile and contact information. By taking into account all of these factors, Gist prioritizes your business contacts and ranks them on how relevant they are to your business.

Gist is extremely versatile, integrating with Gmail, Outlook, Firefox, Chrome, Salesforce.com, Android and the iPhone — but now that RIM owns the company, don’t expect Gist to work with those last two platforms anymore.

In fact, TechCrunch thinks that it will be pretty likely that Gist will only work on BlackBerry from now on:

As Om Malik wrote this past December, it makes sense for RIM to use Gist to incorporate more social elements into BlackBerry phone books and to email as well. Gist says that users can continue to use its platform but it will be interesting to see if RIM will shut the service down in favor of using it exclusively for BlackBerry users. I can imagine that a number of Gist users will be pretty disappointed if this is the case.

For more information on Gist, visit their website here.