LinkedIn dumps Intro in services overhaul
LinkedIn continues to fine tune its services, and has announced on its blog that it will shut down three services it currently provides.
The professional social networking company said it aims to concentrate on doing "fewer things, but better".
As of March 7, 2014, LinkedIn Intro, which was initially launched last year to bring LinkedIn to the email inbox of iPhone users, will no longer be available. Users of Intro will be able to uninstall it between now and March 7, and switch back to their previous mail accounts. Members with Gmail accounts can continue to use Rapportive.
The decision to shut down Intro, a proxy service for emails that injects LinkedIn information for contacts, follows controversy upon the launch of the service that it was breaching privacy rights, such as making changes to users' security profiles on their devices. However, the company's senior manager for information security, Cory Scott, at the time, defended the service and said Intro was rather a potential remedy to the standard inbox.
Slidecast, a service that enables SlideShare members to upload presentations with audio, will also be shutting down on April 30, 2014. Slidecast users will be able to download their Slidecasts until then, and can continue to share the non-audio portions of their presentations with their network on SlideShare.net.
The company also plans to eliminate the support for the LinkedIn iPad app on iOS versions older than 6.0 as of February 18, 2014, to encourage members to have the latest version of its app. This decision follows LinkedIn's decision to stop supporting the LinkedIn mobile app for iOS versions older than 6.0 and Android versions older than 3.0 late last year.
Despite these decisions, LinkedIn reinforced that it is committed to looking at new ways to improve its members' existing experiences. Back in November, the company introduced Showcase Pages, a new scheme for major brands that breaks down their product portfolios and puts the spotlight on more brands.
LinkedIn also recently recorded that government requests of members' data has doubled.