LinkedIn just announced that it has acquired Newsle, a service that lets you connect to Facebook, LinkedIn, and your Gmail contacts, and lets you see when your connections are in the news.

As far as I can tell, it doesn’t do a great job of showing everything, but the concept is interesting. The most recent stuff it’s showing me for my friends at the moment is from May, when I know for a fact that some of these same people have had tons of stuff since then. Perhaps the service itself will improve under LinkedIn’s wings.

In a blog post, LinkedIn’s Ryan Roslansky writes:

“LinkedIn and Newsle share a common goal: We both want to provide professional insights that make you better at what you do. For example, knowing more about the people in your network – like when they’re mentioned in the news – can surface relevant insights that help you hit your next meeting with them out of the park.”

“For the last three years, Newsle has leveraged its disambiguation, natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to build an extremely compelling product that finds blogs and articles that mention you or anyone you care about – colleagues, bosses, industry thought leaders, etc. – and notifies you seconds after they’ve published. We’re excited to work with Newsle’s team to combine this technology with our core assets and build experiences that continue to make you and millions of other professionals more productive and successful.”

The service already has 2 million users after three years. It will remain a standalone service in addition to its integration with LinkedIn’s core services.

Image via Newsle