After hearing about Microsoft's plans to let LinkedIn and other social networks integrate with Microsoft Outlook, one of the first questions that popped to mind was the potential impact on Gist. The service from the Seattle company, backed by Paul Allen, combines email, contacts, calendar items, online links, social-networking feeds and other data.

"Buh-bye Gist," one TechFlash reader observed yesterday.

Not so fast, says Gist CEO T.A. McCann. Answering our questions via email, he said the company has known about the Outlook Social Connector for some time, and doesn't see it as a direct challenge to its business. McCann pointed out that Gist offers much more than an Outlook plugin. The Gist service, currently in beta, also works inside Salesforce.com, via a Web dashboard, and an iPhone app.

Microsoft recently published a case study touting the benefits of Gist's integration with Exchange Server 2010.

The new Outlook Social Connector is more of a direct challenge to Outlook plug-in Xobni, McCann asserted.

In addition, he said, Gist's service is more advanced than the planned Microsoft tool -- not only aggregating messages and social networking feeds but also prioritizing information and automatically finding relevant articles and posts in an attempt to help people gain insights into the people and companies in their networks.

McCann also noted that Gist is thinking about working directly with the Outlook Social Connector.

"We have not seen the dev kit yet, but depending on how rich this is, we could accelerate our delivery of Gist value buy pushing the relevant data into the OSC," he said. "If Outlook can create a rich developer eco-system around the OSC, it would be great for Gist and lots of other developers (except Xobni) and certainly the end users."