RIM is rumored to be on the acquisition trail again according to a report by GigaOm. According to the rumor RIM is in late stage talks to acquire Gist which has a product out there that aggregates contact information from the web into a profile for each of your contacts. They plug their solution into quite a few systems including Outlook and Gmail with a plugin for Firefox and Chrome but I can see the value on a BlackBerry. Gist already has a iPhone and Android app so a BlackBerry integration can not be far off.
RIM has not done a whole lot with the address book on BlackBerrys. I thought this was them limiting themselves to the lowest common denominator that Exchange supports for BES but who knows. It could be they just needed a fresh idea of how to do it. I know they invested in Xobni through the partners fund for that reason so it stands to reason that RIM sees value in a social address book.
Have you ever used Gist (www.gist.com)? I just installed it in Firefox and I will report back what I think. Let us know in the comments if you try it out!
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