LinkedIn announced the end for its iPhone app, LinkedIn Intro, even though the app was only around for a few months. Intro launched in October 2013, and it input LinkedIn contact information onto iPhone Mail. Intro was a cleverly designed app, but it was also critiqued for being invasive, which may be why LinkedIn is sending it out to pasture. The professional social network put a more positive spin on things: according to LinkedIn, Intro is retiring so the company can focus on other projects.
I just got an e-mail from LinkedIn with the subject line “We’re retiring LinkedIn Intro.” Intro is the service the company unveiled last October that cleverly inserted contact information into the iPhone’s Mail app — a piece of software with no mechanism for plug-ins. At least I thought it was clever. Much of the insta-response to the service was stingingly negative: It performed its trick by serving as a middleman between you and your e-mail service, then injecting the contact info into the message as HTML. Some observers saw that as a privacy violation or even a sort of attack.