LinkedIn’s new Contacts Tool: can it really provide smarter relationships?

The professional networking giant Linkedin has launched ‘LinkedIn Contacts’, a new tool which it says will allow people to maintain smart relationships with their LinkedIn connections and to build relationships with people who they don’t know.

The new feature ‘LinkedIn Contacts’ is not yet available to all the users but to a very few as part of the Beta Testing Phase. You could be one of a small group to get it soon, by joining the waiting list. So, what can you get of LinkedIn Contacts? Let’s have a detailed look.

All your contacts in one place

According LinkedIn, Contacts will not just bring together your LinkedIn contacts but also all your address books, emails, and calendars and keeps them up to date in one place. The tool also collects details about your past meetings and conversations (Based on past meeting logged in your calendar and E-mail conversations) with your connections and also allows you to add notes to them (Eg. Had a nice chat on topic ‘XXX’ with this person ‘YYY’ on event ‘ZZZ’ ).

According to Sachin Rekhi (Product Lead, LinkedIn), this tool can also grab contacts from applications like TripIt, Evernote and Cardmunch. Rekhi also added that, the tool does not access data from Twitter, Facebook and enterprise applications like ERP and CRM for now.

LinkedIn Contacts also give notifications to users about their contacts having birthdays and job changes in their network. Rekhi also told reporters that “It actually shows you the folks you’ve lost touch within your network”.

Mobile

LinkedIn Contacts is also available on iPhone to stay in touch with your connections on the go. The company is in process to also come up with an android application and an optimized version for the users to access from any mobile browser.

Rekhi also added ‘LinkedIn has no intention to pull contacts from Twitter or Facebook, as it wants to stay focused on your professional relationships’. LinkedIn contacts also use an algorithm to differentiate real people from the spammers to show up in your contacts list. It is also possible for the users to filter their contact list in number of ways like the last time the user interacted with people on their list and by the people who are added recently. LinkedIn Contacts tool promises to solve one of the major challenges faced by the professionals across the world nowadays. We will have to wait for LinkedIn to make the tool available for all the users to explore more about the features and limitations.

This new feature can be accessed from the LinkedIn homepage as well as through an iPhone app exclusively designed for LinkedIn Contacts.