It happens to all of us at some point: you get a little tipsy, you open up your computer and you’re trying out some fancy new contacts app; or you’re just not really paying attention to what’s happening in your browser. And then BOOM, you’ve signed up for a LinkedIn account. Good luck. You have now ruined your e-mail forever.
We all hate the seemingly unstoppable spam that LinkedIn loves to spray all over our inboxes almost daily, but now the company has gone one better, able to inject its insidiousness right inside the native mail app of your iPhone, using a kind of “plug in.” How is this sorcery done?
If you use LinkedIn then this is actually an amazing hack. It’s called LinkedIn Intro and it uses an iOS Profile to insert a strip of info into incoming mails form other LinkedIn users. It also adds a snippet to your outgoing mails if you so choose. Tapping on this strip will show the sender’s LinkedIn info, and you can add them to your network right there.
Profiles are often used to do things like let you install apps from outside the App Store, using a service like TestFlight, for example. Or they’re used to enable things like the Eye-Fi cards to get deeper hooks into the system. I don’t understand how they work, but I know they allow magical things to happen.
Who knows what can be done with profiles? I hate LinkedIn as much as the next man, but I’d actually like to see other services integrated into my Mail app. Dropbox would be neat, as would Twitter (avatars, recent tweets maybe) and maybe even an online address book service (like Gmail).
We’ll wait and see who’s next to come up with something neat. In the meantime, please excuse me: I’m going to open a bottle of whisky and try to delete my LinkedIn account once again.
