Intro for iPhone – No Longer Supported | Hacker News Reader

Intro for iPhone – No Longer Supported

help.linkedin.com

91 pointsEGF41 comments

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 ?

Endorsements serve a purpose for LinkedIn. They keep users coming back to the site when they receive the "X has endorsed you for Y" emails.

You can tell endorsements are mostly for LinkedIn's benefit when you notice they don't even expose them in their API.

Yep. Endorsements are very clearly built as a LinkedIn engagement and retention feature.

I think people are able to endorse you for anything. The more keyword-rich a profile is, the better targeted the advertising. ;-)

Yes. Endorsing your friends for the most bizarre thing you can think of, is always great fun.

Never accept an endorsement for anything boring like work.

I'm gay, and a friend and former colleague went through a period of regularly endorsing me with anything that sounded at all that could sound either camp or gay. I can't seem to figure out how to find them now, and off the top of my head the only one I can think of is Pearl (I'm not a programmer, and I doubt he even knows Pearl is there as a programming language). Meanwhile I'd return the favour with anything that hinted towards the fact that he's a massive pervert.

Was great fun for a while, and the only use I've ever had from endorsements, which I've now completely disabled.

My favorite is "Problem Gambling." I don't even know why it'd be in their list of endorsable things.

Counselors can specialize in treating gaming addictions.

Groups is a good idea that's being poorly used. Some groups are set up to promote a single person or group, yet have generic names. Others are used by people not familiar with Stackexchange for asking technical questions.

They make sense for a professional networking site, but they have to be guided towards relevance.

I agree. This could be of great value if they would cultivate it and see what works.

I found a great way to cut down on this spam: Delete your LinkedIn account.

I removed mine 3 years ago and I never once regretted it.

I removed mine about the same time frame too. No regrets. It has not hindered my networking or hireability.

I just applied to several jobs within the last few days; Jobvite lets me "one-click" apply with my LinkedIn profile, which is so much easier than those "upload your resume and we're going to mangle it in our web form".

Disclaimer: Received several calls back same day/next day, in my mind that means its working as its supposed to.

Why not tie it to an e-mail you can more easily filter (or choose not to look at)?

Just wanted to say I hate endorsements as well.

I never accept any endorsements and I think some person actually removed me off his contact list because:

a) I didn't accept his endorsement.

b) Didn't endorse him in return (people seem to expect this?)

I didn't even know you had to accept endorsements. And as ridiculous as they are, I never did bother to return the 'favor.' Perhaps this is just another incarnation of "you didn't Like my post" Facebook drama.

>Stop the spam

So its not ok for LinkedIn to spam you but its ok for you to spam all your contacts with a mass holiday greeting to "stay in touch"? Ok.

I've never understood complaining about recruiters.

"Woe is me: I have to spend a few minutes deleting emails from people trying to hire me into well-paying professional jobs."

It's probably the most first world problem that could possibly exist. Ughhh fuck I'm so tired of making six figures while someone else offers me that!!

Are endorsements faked? I've deleted my account, but next time I would ask your uncle if he actually endorsed you for X, because I have a strange feeling they are completely fabricated.

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.

Totally agree. Instead of just erasing the source code, they could release it as open source. I for once would love to play with it.

I hear you dan. Let me see what I can do.

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.

Isn't LinkedIn supposed to be for maintaining contact with people you've already met? So you should already have experienced the excitement of meeting the person before you see the boring generic message.

Due to less than reliable content of my profile, I sometimes get connect requests from people I have never had anything to do with.

It would be rude not to accept.

P.S. Then of course they get an amusing email every time I update my Headline

It is not rude to decline a connection request from someone you do not know.

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?

I'm guessing low acceptance. It was an interesting hack, but honestly, could you picture anyone clamoring for this feature? And then getting past the setup steps?

Frankly I thought it was a pretty shocking product to launch, for all the predicable reasons it was panned, until I contrived a more charitable explanation: LinkedIn management is willing to greenlight goofy "20%-style" projects by the engineers.

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)

Adoption.

Not that many people care/are aware about the privacy/security issues at stake.

It was too much of a niche thing (i.e. not for iphone's "average" users) and from a big enough player that Apple wouldn't protest.

But it was a complicated and long process to install/configure it. I doubt many non-geeks bothered. So it probably never got any traction beyond a few thousand users. Not worth keeping around at Linkedin's scale.

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.

This may help: http://www.bishopfox.com/blog/2013/10/linkedin-intro/

and the blog post announcing it: https://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/linkedin-intro-doing...

https://intro.linkedin.com/

Send your mail to them to let them rewrite the html to insert LinkedIn information within the message.

Intro shows you LinkedIn profiles in your iPhone Mail app.

http://blog.linkedin.com/2013/10/23/announcing-linkedin-intr...

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.

I don't think their engineers are the ones who thought it up.

No, you're most likely right.

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

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