By Elena Zanone

Just in time for last week’s commemoration of Administrative Professionals Day — a.k.a. Secretary Day — LinkedIn rolled out a new service called Contacts that acts as a virtual secretary. The app, currently in limited testing, lets users sync data from other productivity tools they’re using and sets reminders for meetings, calls and past correspondence with contacts.

Contacts comes from a company called Connected that LinkedIn acquired in October 2011. It seems to move the professional social net even closer to its mission to become more than just a rolodex.

“When you think about LinkedIn.com today, many people already consider it their professional rolodex, but today it truly only represents the explicit connections that you’ve created on LinkedIn.com. The reality is our professional lives span more than LinkedIn.com, and our contacts are kind of spread everywhere,” explained Sarchin Rekhi, Linked In’s product lead for Contacts.

Contacts aggregates information such as email addresses, phone numbers and calendar notices neatly into one place that is accessible both on LinkedIn’s free iPhone app and on the web. Users can pull data from networking tools they’re already using and sync it to their profiles, including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Outlook, TripIt, and Evernote. There is no talk yet of integrating Facebook and Twitter.

Contacts also culls details such as past conversations and meetings so users can see past correspondence with their contacts at a glance. One nifty feature is how users can set up reminders within the tool for when to contact people in their network.

Linked In put it this way: “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.”

Users will also be able to see the people they’ve most recently spoken to, or those they’ve “lost touch” with. The service seems to index everything using an algorithm to make sure that only real connections, not spammers, show up in contacts lists.

Contacts is currently an invite-only service available exclusively in the United States. Users can join the waiting list here.

Source LinkedIn