Intro for iPhone – No Longer Supported (opens in new tab)

Thank you LinkedIn. Good riddance. While you are at it, how about fixing/retiring the following things as well:

- Endorsements. They serve no purpose other than "look I am so cool" and for recruiter to find you by keywords that does not make much sense. Plus I have no interest in getting endorsed by my uncle for something he has no clue about.

- Groups: These end up being nothing but recruiter spam.

- Stop the spam of "Please join linkedin premium trial for 30 days". I get this email every other week. If I am interested, I would have joined by now. Don't you get it.

- And the classic one. It is ok for you to spam my gmail contacts but I cannot even send a group email to all my connections at once (you have a stupid cap)? One use case is that during the Christmas/new Year time, I like to send a note to all my contacts saying hi. Yes not very pesonalized but for me the whole point of linkedin is to stay in touch with my professional connections. Guess what ? You limit the number of connections I can send a note to in one message. really ?

An open-source version of the backend code would be pretty awesome, though. It was a smart idea even if it wasn't well-suited to the use it was put to. Wouldn't it be neat if you could have extra contextual info added to your e-mails without having to install anything on your phone or mail client? It could be made modular so whatever services you use could provide plugins you could add/remove at will -- CRM, lead tracking, sender analytics (this person e-mails you 3X a week?), Amazon links for products, social network profiles, etc. If you host it yourself, you don't have the privacy issues of (another) 3rd-party having access to your mail.

It was admittedly a good hack for getting into the otherwise non-customizable iPhone mail client.

I feel like if a scrappy startup had done it, it'd be innovative, but with LI, well, the reaction was not that great.

LinkedIn's biggest problem can be traced to a single line of code: the placeholder that reads, "I would like to add you to my professional network."

The joy and excitement of real-life networking stems from meeting someone, recognizing that you share an interest or skillset, and connecting on the basis of that skill or interest.

For example, if I discuss JavaScript w/ a developer at a networking event, I keep him or her in mind for my next JS project. With in-person networking, I know not only who is in my network, but how and why they might want to collaborate.

By allowing for a meaningless, generic prompt, LinkedIn strips the excitement out of networking. It makes the game about quantity more than quality. Users end up with broader networks, but they fail to understand the meaning or potential of those connections.

I wonder if this was killed because of low acceptance, or because of the privacy and security concerns? Did Apple ever speak about this being any type of concern?

Good! Intro is a Security and privacy disaster:

[Podcast: Understanding the Dangers of LinkedIn Intro] http://www.securityweek.com/podcast-understanding-dangers-li...

I wonder if

- Apple told them they had better stop

- Adoption was lackluster

- The privacy complaints overwhelmed any benefit

(or all three)

The most interesting thing I notice about this announcement is that LinkedIn is using an Oracle product to do their customer support. I'm getting tired of sites that don't allow my back button to navigate away from them.

What is intro? I tried looking around their site but I didn't see anything.

Well, that didn't take too long. I still can't get over the idea that their engineers thought it was a good idea in the first place.

Really? Wasn't it because of the security and privacy concerns pointed here many times?