If you find you have trouble keeping in touch with coworkers that you used to work with or an old manager you'd love to use as a reference, Mingly is a new webapp that makes it easy for you to stay in touch and up to date with your personal and professional network as major events take place in their lives. It doesn't replace your social networks, but it does help you use them more efficiently.


Mingly is completely free, and available as a webapp, a Gmail plug-in, and an email digest that all serve to keep you up to date on what's going on in the lives of the people you really want to stay in touch with. Sure, you could just log in to Facebook and look to see who has a birthday coming up, or head to LinkedIn and see who's been promoted recently or who'll be in your town on a business trip, but Mingly combines all of that data into a single place that's easy to check—or in the case of the email digest and Gmail plugins, comes right to you instead of forcing you to go looking for it.

To use Mingly, you'll have to sign in with a Google account. Then you can connect the webapp to Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter—whichever networks you'd like to use Mingly with. Once you're set up, you can interact with people right in the Mingly webapp, or go to your networks individually to talk to friends with major events coming up. Best of all, you can customize which people and types of events you want to be notified about. If you'd prefer to use it to stay in touch with your professional network, you can omit birthdays and other personal events, for example. Do you think there's room for social aggregators and assistants like Mingly, or is the access they require to provide their services too high a price for what you get? Share your thoughts in the comments below.


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