Anyone who feels overwhelmed with email, blog posts, Twitter messages and Facebook updates will understand the business problem being addressed by Gist. The year-old Seattle startup company, which today is announcing $6.75 million in a first round of funding from Foundry Group and Vulcan Capital, is simply trying to help people manage information overload.

It is doing this by consolidating all messages  -- whether a Tweet, an email or a Facebook message -- in one spot. Gist is still months away from publicly unveiling its service, but co-founder and CEO T.A. McCann thinks they have built something more robust than San Francisco rivals such as Xobni and InsideView both of which raised funding four months ago.

Organizing Web information and then parsing it in such a way that it is meaningful to the reader is a big opportunity that heavyweights such as Facebook, Microsoft and Google also are attempting to address. But McCann, a well known Seattle entrepreneur who also worked in Microsoft's Exchange Server Group, welcomes the competition.

"The CRM players are trying to do some of this ... the communications guys are trying to do some of it and the social networking guys are trying to do some of it," he said. "But that's why it is fun. I mean it is a big huge space that is going to evolve significantly over the next three to five years."

With the latest capital infusion, McCann said they have plenty of money now "to go and fight the good fight."

Perhaps the closest competitor to Gist is Xobni, which scored $10 million in funding from BlackBerry Partners, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital and others earlier this year.

Xobni -- co-founded in 2006 by former Expedia employee Adam Smith -- is focused on helping people organize and mine information in Microsoft Outlook. Like Gist, it is based around the concept of helping organize information related to business contacts so relevant information floats to the top. 

Xobni -- whose name is inbox spelled backwards -- also has partnerships with LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype and Hoover's.

McCann says Gist will go further, not only supporting Outlook but Web-based email systems like Gmail. It also will incorporate information flowing through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites. 

"The inbox needs innovation for sure, but it is not where we are stopping," he said. "It is just one of many forms of content we are trying to bring together, with our real focus primarily around enhancing business relationships to get results."

That also means LinkedIn will be in the crosshairs, since it too is about enhancing business relationships. And what about Microsoft jumping into the game, adding this sort of functionality to email?

McCann doesn't think it will happen anytime soon, saying the new Exchange and Outlook products have "zero features" when it comes to improving how people find and organize information across various platforms. Furthermore, he said Outlook is "buried inside of Office," which makes it tough for Microsoft to innovate. He continued:

"We could both look at Outlook and say: 'how much innovation has really happened in the last 10 years in that product?' Very little. The product barely even works to search and find emails relative to something like Gmail. I think Outlook has tons and tons of work just to become a best in class ... mail client, let alone doing these kinds of connections to its external data sources and really enhancing the overall messaging experience."

In that regard, McCann said Google with all of the innovation it is doing around Gmail is a bigger threat at the moment.

Still, as McCann sees it, people are spending way too much time trying manage messages in various inboxes, with no real way to organize that information in one "federated inbox." Moving all of those various messages into a cloud-based system will allow users to more intelligently track contacts and their activities, he said.

For example, a CEO could peruse all of the Twitter messages, blog posts and news articles from a journalist before an important press meeting. On that same Web page, the most recent emails that have gone back and forth between the CEO and the reporter also could be viewed.

Consolidating that information in one spot has a lot of value, said McCann. And it is not just in saving people's time.

"Ultimately, what we are building is an intelligent agent which is continuing to stitch together information on behalf of a user to give them greater insight and build stronger connections with other users," he said.

At this point, the company hasn't determined how much it will charge for the service. But McCann said they will incorporate some sort of subscription plan.

As part of the funding round, Foundry Group's Brad Feld has joined Gist's board. It employs 10 people at its Pioneer Square headquarters, with plans to nearly double by the end of the year.