Gist promises to be your go-to app to stay up-to-date and in-the-know about everyone on your contact list. First, add in your contacts from your Android device, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, Twitter or CSV/vCard files. Once uploaded, the app goes to work, creating a universal inbox for communicating with your colleagues, as well as automatically following and delivering everyone, wherever they might live or post online.

That means getting alerts about each company's new products and services posted on Twitter or Facebook, blog posts about individuals or firms, Google search results and more.

This is a critical tool to prep you for that next big sales call: "Hey, I see you've been working on X this week, or your company closed that X deal, great!"

The app does a bang-up job of organizing your contacts, as well as keeping real-time tabs on their communications. The icing on the cake is the ability to prioritize contacts, based on which company they work for, how important they are to your daily work, and how often they update their status or projects in various online sites.

You can also easily filter incoming communications and updates by company, importance, network, blogs, news or people.

In our connected world, it's more critical than ever to employ tools like Gist to keep us connected to our most important co-workers, clients, customers and, yes, family members.