You’ve probably heard of Dunbar’s number and his theory that the human brain can only handle 150 stable social relationships. These are relationships where you know the person well and understand how they relate to the group.

For most of us, our connections far surpass 150. Once you take into account family members, high school acquaintances, college friends, colleagues, neighbors, clients, your significant other’s network, your children’s friends (and their parents), the list of people you socialize with can easily top over 1,000 people. When meeting up with all your connections, it can be difficult to remember their first name, much less where they work or where their spouse grew up.

That’s the problem the Refresh app is trying to solve. Refresh markets itself as an “instant dossier” to help you catch up on anyone you have a meeting with. You can search through people and see what they’ve been up to across all their platforms (latest blog posts, tweets, etc.) or sync it to your calendar so before an appointment, a refresher pops up on your phone to remind you of vital information.

A neat feature is that the app finds similarities between you and your contact– maybe you have siblings who are the same age, or your spouses went to the same university. This makes it easy to strike up natural conversations– especially helpful when interviewing for a job or chatting with someone you’d like to impress. Of course, the danger is that you’d know too much about them and come across as a little creepy– just use common sense and bring topics up casually. We’ve written before about the need to google your professional contacts, and this app makes that a seamless part of your workday.

Refresh is free and is currently only available for iOS, but they’re working on an Android version. You can join the waiting list here to be notified when it becomes available.

Posted on 11/15/2013

Written by Liz Wassmann, Dot Complicated staff

Comments

comments