LinkedIn to Kill Its "Intro" Email Product Months After Launch

Well, that was fast.

Less than six months after its launch, LinkedIn announced on Friday that it plans to kill “Intro,” a mobile service that hooks LinkedIn profile information into a user’s mobile email application.

“We are making large, long-term investments on a few big bets, and in order to make them successful, we need to concentrate on fewer things,” said a LinkedIn spokeswoman. “With that in mind, we’ve taken a look at our product offerings and made the decision to shut down Intro and Slidecast as well as older versions of our iPad and iPhone apps.”

Intro was essentially a plugin for iPhones that worked hand in hand with the email app. After hooking up Intro, if you received an email from someone who had a LinkedIn profile, a small synopsis of their profile would appear inside of the email. The idea was to provide a quick way to learn about who’s sending you messages, while also serving as a clever method of redirecting users to LinkedIn’s site from inside their inbox.

It was part of a larger product suite rollout last October, a pitch from LinkedIn that it was going “mobile-first,” à la Facebook, Twitter and other Valley giants.

But almost immediately after Intro was, well, intro’d, questions arose about the application’s security methods. Some researchers went so far as to call it “a dream for attackers.”

Another problem: The product was not particularly easy to set up and required digging into a user’s email settings app. That could have affected actual install rates.

Intro will be shut down as of March 7, though LinkedIn members can continue to use Rapportive.com, the service Intro was based on (and which LinkedIn acquired previously).

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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