LinkedIn dumps Intro Apple mail service

LinkedIn has dumped its Intro mail integration product after less than four months availability.

The product, which integrated with Apple’s Mail app to display details from a person’s LinkedIn profile within an email, was announced late in October last year.

It was built on the software of Rapportive, a social email company LinkedIn acquired in February 2012.

It displayed a sender's name, position and company within the body of the message. A drop down menu enabled access to even more details drom the sender’s LinkedIn profile.

The service was criticised by users, who held concerns about the company's handling of user data, while claims arose Intro could change users' security profiles and wipe or make changes to settings.

In a recent blog post LinkedIn said it would shut down Intro as of March 7. It did not provide an explicit reason beyond saying that it wanted to do more with less.

“We are making large, long-term investments on a few big bets, and in order to ensure their success, we need to concentrate on fewer things. Our goal is to provide our members with seamless experiences – not just individual products – that will help them become more productive and successful professionals,” it said in the post.

“While Intro is going away, we will continue to work on bringing the power of LinkedIn to wherever our members work. Email, where the average professional spends more than a quarter of their time, is one of those places, so we’ll continue to look for ways to bring this kind of functionality to our members through existing partnerships.”

It said its Rapportive service would remain available to Gmail users.

LinkedIn will also close its Slidecast service (which allows users of slide hosting service SlideShare to upload presentations with audio) at the end of April, and stop supporting LinkedIn iPads apps on iOS version 6.0 and older as of February 18.