Wish LinkedIn would remind you to wish your favorite client a happy birthday? LinkedIn has introduced a new feature called LinkedIn Contacts, to help users better manage their relationships with their professional contacts. Call it CRM for professional networkers.

Using the tool, LinkedIn users can bring together contacts from their address books, email account, and calendar. This information is overlaid with details about past conversations and meetings on that contact’s profile.

Here is more from the LinkedIn blog: “Get alerted on job changes and birthdays in your network, a perfect opportunity to stay in touch. Also, you can set reminders and add notes about the important people in your life.”

AppNewser asked, What’s Favorite App, Dan Roth?

The executive editor at LinkedIn picked to-do app Wunderlist because, “the app is clean and simple, loads instantly and works on every platform,” which Roth considers essential, “if, like me, you need to get your must-dos written down quickly or have them disappear into the ether,” he said.

Roth also likes that the app is free and he can prioritize his lists. “I used to use Remember the Milk, but prefer Wunderlist’s easier method for prioritizing, as well as its ability to share lists,” he continued. “I love watching what happens when I complete a to-do: the text gets crossed out, a big check appears and the item drops into a Recently Completed section. And for a few seconds I can feel like Sisyphus reaching the top of the mountain.”

Welcome to our new column, What’s Your Favorite App?, a new feature where we talk to media professionals, journalists and authors about what kinds of apps they are using in hopes of helping readers discover new apps. Read more

Are you looking for a new job? Using a new tool at Visual.ly, you can build an infographic out of your LinkedIn resume, showing employers (and yourself) a simple map of your career.

SocialTimes explained why this can help your job search. You can choose from several different templates, showing employers how many years you spent in various fields, what your key skills are and showcase recommendations on your LinkedIn page. Here’s more from SocialTimes:

Data visualization platform Visual.ly now connects to LinkedIn to instantly turn the contents of your professional profile into an infographic. There are a few templates to choose from: none of them are plain old white, but they all organize the data in a clean, logical order. All of the essentials are there: your name, your work history, your skills, and your education. What this resume will show that a traditional resume will not is information about your connections.

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Do you use endorsements or notifications on LinkedIn?

Over at SocialTimes, one writer argued that these two functions are changing the way people present their work lives online. If you don’t share these functions with your LinkedIn community, you could be missing out. Here’s more from the blog:

Part of the problem with LinkedIn has been that people already have so many other social networks to maintain that there isn’t much time to check in with colleagues and see what’s happening in their careers until it’s time to find a new job or to look for someone to hire. The little updates automate the process of keeping touch. LinkedIn added Notifications to members’ homepages in September. In November, the company reported in a third quarter earnings call that members had posted four times as many comments on other people’s updates. As for the newly added Endorsements, you can see pretty quickly which of your skills are the most valuable to your network, or at least the most widely known, by how many people have clicked on them. (LinkedIn said that there were already 200 million endorsements made at the close of quarter three.)

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The mobile app business is only a couple of years old and it can be a challenge for professionals who are inventing its future on a daily basis. To help you find other like-minded professionals who are navigating the same opportunities, challenges and experiments that you are, we’ve put together a list of LinkedIn groups for mobile app professionals.

If you want to join these groups, follow LinkedIn’s Finding and Joining a Group directions. Here’s an excerpt: “Group managers may review your request to join or ask for additional information to make sure you meet their membership criteria. Membership approval is solely up to the group manager.”

Here is the list of the groups, with links so that you can explore them on your own. Read more