A new app for LinkedIn is ambitiously taking personal updates to a whole new level, with its new app, The Connected.  This app is going much farther than LinkedIn’s other app Contacts, which The Connected will replace.  The idea is to use social account information to provide relative information to users before meeting they meet up in the real world.  

With its card-like interface, The Connected brings its users notifications about updates happening throughout a user’s network.  Unlike Contacts, The Connected is able to integrate a smartphone’s calendar as well, which allows it to store forthcoming appointments.  And The Connected is serious about its notifications: even when off, as long as a user is on LinkedIn somewhere, The Connected will “ping” them updates, from everything like “meeting in 15 minutes” to “remember to ask Matt how that vacation with his hippie daughter went.” 

LinkedIn is trying to capitalize on both the explosion of shared data between apps and the trend of “implicit personalization”.  Through this process, personal digital assistants (e.g. Siri, Google Now, The Connected) are able to “learn” about their users without people having to manually or proactively input the information themselves.  As an example, these programs will notice who is marked as “sister,” “boss,” or “mortal enemy” in a user’s contact, and then the program will make decisions about who is the most relevant. Using this type of information, LinkedIn is hoping to keep its members from being bombarded with superfluous information.  The company has honed its algorithms, so users should expect a variety of new features that seek to make individual networks more relevant. 

In summary, LinkedIn is taking an innovative step to strengthen the link between social networks and real world meetings.  It will be interesting to see if any of the other social media companies, such as Facebook, will follow LinkedIn’s model, and try to start pinging network updates.  Regardless, The Connected will be a great tool to help you remember your boss’s birthday, and other little details that will give you the edge in personal networking both online and in the real world.  

Read more over at Forbes.com.