My first day with Gist - a detailed troubleshooting list.

My experience so far with Gist...

After creating my account I got to the My Account page, with the tabs for accounts at the bottom. Since I don't have Outlook, I logically went to the second tab, LinkedIn. After going through the instructions, I tried importing the contacts file but the page just stayed there, with the status bar showing it was trying to load stuff from gist and google-analytics.

While importing, there's a message saying that the LinkedIn import would be more useful if I already have email contacts in my account. Well, if that is the case, then the LinkedIn tab should be place *after* the Gmail tab and not before it.

I gave up on the LinkedIn import for the moment, and proceeded to import my Gmail account. This went smoothly until I noticed it had failed to recognize some contacts as the same. Remembering Gmail now offers contact merging, I opted for fixing this within Gmail and re-importing the contacts to Gist. However, I could not find any way to do this and it seems Gist was not bringing in the new contacts on later refreshes.

Also, while Gist was importing the contacts, it said "We have news for you!" (next to the "Start Using Gist" button. Clicking on the button led to a dashboard page that reads "We don't have news for you right now, but we're always looking!" - Well, which is it? I guess since "No news is good news" maybe they're both right, eh?





Gist also had trouble recognizing contact names with accented characters, leading to names like "=?ISO 8859 1?Q?Ram =F3r..." instead of the more conventional "Ramón."

Next, I tried to connect Gist with my Facebook account, but the Facebook dialog was partly hidden within the website (see attached image GistFacebook.png). This was apparently fixed later in the day and I eventually managed to integrate Facebook.



While trying to reimport my Gmail contacts I noticed that the Gmail tab was using my company url to fill the Google Email field, instead of my email address. This might be related to 1Password - just in case you're keeping track of other software that might interfere.



I eventually decided that the best course of action was to reset my data from Gist (since there was a button for doing just that) and re-import everything, in the right order.

After I told Gist to reset my data the following happened:

Trying to add my Gmail account resulted in an error, which eventually became a message that "This account has already been created." So far, Gist has not synchronized this account, so I'm left without my contacts and emails. The My Accounts tab indicates this account has never been updated.



Trying to import my LinkedIn data resulted in another error: "An error occurred: execution expired."



I still have no LinkedIn data in my account, even though the Accounts tab says Gist is monitoring my Facebook, Gmail and LinkedIn accounts.



When it worked, the information I received from Gist seemed very good and useful. The service at this time seems very sluggish to respond and switch pages. I hope I can get my LinkedIn and Gmail contacts back into the system... right now, all I have is my Facebook data.