LinkedIn rival Viadeo gets clever with your contacts

While LinkedIn tends to get most of the attention when it comes to social networking for professionals, Viadeo is doing particularly well for itself in parts of Europe, Asia and South America and now claims over 30 million users worldwide. The service, which offers a similar featureset to LinkedIn, has now launched a rather smart new address book.

This newly updated section of the site not only brings all your contacts’ details (email address, phone numbers etc) together in one place, rather than having to head to individual profiles to work out how to reach that useful sales lead. It updates itself too, meaning that you always have the most up-to-date contact details available to you.

To improve privacy, you can choose to share “personal” or “business” details with different contacts. This should be good if you want to share, say, your mobile phone number with your closest contacts but not with that guy who keeps pestering you about the project you’re still busy working on. You can even choose to share absolutely no details at all with some contacts if you like.

While it doesn’t tend to get much mainstream tech press, Paris-based Viadeo is busy expanding through acquisitions (it bought business social network ApnaCircle in India, for example) and by specifically targeting emerging markets.

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