About a month ago, LinkedIn angered some of its business users when it announced that it would get rid of the Products/Services tab in favor of Showcase Pages. Now it’s irritating users again by shutting down its business card scanning product CardMunch in favor of new integration with Evernote.

Do you like the direction LinkedIn is going with business cards? Let us know in the comments.

LinkedIn made the announcement on Wednesday. It said it is “deepening” its partnership with Evernote, and shutting down the CardMunch app. Going forward, LinkedIn members will be able to scan business cards using Evernote’s mobile app, and directly connect it with contacts on LinkedIn.

“In Evernote, our members will be able to view profile photos, job titles and company information from LinkedIn right in the notes created when they scan business cards,” said LinkedIn’s Bob Rosin. “LinkedIn members will now also be able to enter comments related to the scanned card and geo-tag the location where the card was scanned.”

“All LinkedIn members who use CardMunch and choose to transfer their existing scanned cards into Evernote will receive two free years of Evernote’s premium business card scanning service. Members will be able to quickly and easily migrate their CardMunch data to Evernote,” he said.

Data from CardMunch is available in the LinkedIn Contacts feature/app as well. It can also be downloaded for those who don’t want to transfer it to Evernote.

Even if you don’t use CardMuch, you can get a year of free Evernote business card scanning if you connect your LinkedIn account to the app.

Evernote put out this tutorial on business card scanning:

As mentioned, LinkedIn’s move from CardMunch to Evernote isn’t sitting too well with some users. Here are some things people have said in the comments sections on various tech blogs covering the news.

On TechCrunch:

I am sorry but this is just LAME on the part of LinkedIn. What kind of “Business network” does not care about adding new connections quickly and easily? They should have built this into the core LinkedIN app not dumped it.

I have tried the Evernote version and it is way slower harder to use. ( I am an evernote Pro user)

…

Such a bad call of LinkedIN. they prove again and again they really don t get mobile. Cardmunch was a killer service, blowing away any competition (including current evernote card scanning service). It should have been part of the main linkedin app, and would have been helpful to become the #1 killer app for business events…

…

I did the transfer, and they simply dumped all the cards as individual notes in my general Evernote folder. Would it have been hard to create a “CardMunch” notebook and put them in there?? I’ll use LinkedIn less as a result of this.

…

It is a shame that Cardmunch, the ‘holy grail’ of business card scanners, is being put under the bus. At least someone should save it and make it available cross-platform all users, not just iOS? LinkedIn is making a serious mistake here. What about Blackberry 10 users? Lot’s of potential there.

From TheNextWeb:

Unfortunate, and interesting all at once. CardMunch was great. Scanning business cards into Evernote? Not so great.

From The Verge:

This is disappointing. The great advantage of CardMunch was that with the human transcription you got near 100% accuracy with every scan. I tried Evernote’s business card OCR and it works but is not nearly as accurate.

…

CardMunch was awesome. I’m so pissed LinkedIn abandoned it. I thought they would take the opportunity to leverage CardMunch into a suite of professional contact management services that would sync with their apps and websites. What a blown opportunity to give LinkedIn members something that is actually useful instead of basing their whole model around spam and job hunters.

There are plenty more on various articles around the web.

CardMunch will be discontinued as of July 11th.

At least LinkedIn continues to add features to Company Pages and Showcase Pages.

What do you think of LinkedIn’s move to Evernote? Let us know in the comments.

Image via LinkedIn