It’s pretty easy to establish a pool of useful contacts on LinkedIn. Remembering to stay in touch with them all is the difficult part. FiveHundredPlus is a simple but useful app that helps solve that problem.
After signing in with your LinkedIn account, you’ll see a TweetDeck-style column layout with all your contacts listed to the left. You can then drag each of them into the column corresponding with how often you’d like to be reminded to get in touch with them, be that weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually.
The result will look a little like this (although if you’re in the screenshot below, don’t be offended – this isn’t necessarily how often I actually want to contact you). Now, the service will email you reminders to get in touch with contacts at the intervals you’ve chosen.
There’s a little more to it than that too. Beyond being a personal tool, it can be used by teams, for example PR companies or people working in sales who want to regulate how often they contact certain people. For journalists, if could be useful for keeping in touch with good contacts who may occasionally have interesting stories to share when asked.
The app can also log interactions you have with individual contacts. This can be done automatically by BCCing FiveHundredPlus in an email to them, or manually by logging emails, IMs, phonecalls, meetings and social media conversations within the app itself. That said, this would probably be a pain for most people to keep up.
Founded in October 2012, FiveHundredPlus is the self-funded work of Geir Freysson (based in London, UK) and Agnar Sigmarsson (based in Reykjavik, Iceland). Although the app is currently free, the plan is to add paid-for premium features in the future. Support for other services beyond LinkedIn is also on the roadmap.
Although only at ‘minimum viable product’ stage, the app is already a tool that many people will find genuinely valuable and it will be interesting to see where Freysson and Sigmarsson take it from here.
Header image credit: George Doyle / Thinkstock
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