- LinkedIn’s new iPhone email feature, “intro,” brings LinkedIn profile information to emails, as seen here.
LinkedIn launched several mobile features Wednesday aimed at making the company a bigger part of members’ communications.
A new service called “Intro” shows iPhone users the LinkedIn profiles of people who have sent them email. Without leaving the regular iPhone email app, the recipient of an email can see the sender’s name, LinkedIn profile picture, workplace and title. The recipient can also click to see more about the sender’s career, and how they are connected on LinkedIn by other users.
LinkedIn said members who want the service can sign up for it free on their iPhones immediately. LinkedIn members who don’t sign up will still automatically have their public profiles shown to people who use the service.
A LinkedIn spokeswoman said LinkedIn members cannot opt out of having their profiles included in the service, but said only their public profiles are displayed.
“This answers the question, ‘Who is this?’ and addresses spam,” said Deep Nishar, senior vice president of LinkedIn’s product and user experience.
The functionality was originally built to work with Gmail by a startup called Rapportive. LinkedIn bought the company a year and a half ago.
LinkedIn on Wednesday also introduced a new iPad app, available for free, with a refreshed design and new gesture functionality that lets users slide to add a fellow user as a connection or to see more about a content post. LinkedIn iPad app users can also now search for jobs. (A LinkedIn executive slyly suggested that’s just in case users get fed up at work and take their tablets to lunch. It’s not a far-fetched notion: More than 30 percent of LinkedIn job views come from mobile and half of members who’ve applied via mobile for jobs posted on LinkedIn have never applied from their desktop, the company said.)
Finally, the company also said new integration of its services with the reading app Pulse is coming soon, personalized for users around professional news and topics. The app will pull in articles being shared by members’ LinkedIn connections.
A launch event for the new services came with a hiccup: LinkedIn’s website and apps were uncharacteristically down or very slow for some users Wednesday morning for at least an hour.
With new content and mobile features, LinkedIn is trying to grow its usefulness beyond being a professional online resume and into more of a social and mobile network. The company says its mobile site and app visits have nearly tripled in the past two years.
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