Tag Archive for 'linkedin'

Reid Hoffman on Web 2.0

Published by Ben Kepes on June 20, 2008 in Business, IT, New business, Strategy and Web x.0. 0 Comments

Sarah Lacy interviews Reid Hoffman to get his read on Web 2.0 business. The interview was recorded on the same day that LinkedIn had an outage so Sarah asks the obvious questions around outages and the harm they can do to a start-up.

Sarah also asked Reid who he thought would be the survivors out of the Web 2.0 pool. Reid’s take was that there will be 3-6 players that survive this cycle, and they’ll M&A the promising others. Obviously he put LinkedIn in the survivor pool. A commentator left what could be described as the “emperors new clothes” comment par excellence when he said;

What could stop Web 2.0 is when advertisers come to the realization that nobody actually clicks on the advertisements on these social networking sites because people are too busy networking to click an ad. How does a social networking company make money without advertising? They charge a fee to use it that’s how, then what will happen?

Reid’s tip for the next wave of successful web companies? Lightweight social gaming!

My tip to Reid? Stop social gaming and get out and do some exercise buddy

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LinkedIn replacing email? No time soon…

Published by Ben Kepes on June 13, 2008 in Design, Efficiency, IT, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 1 Comment

Over on RWW, Bernard posted suggesting that LinkedIn is both a Gmail and an Outlook killer. His rationale seems to come from the fact that LinkedIn mail is always up to date (as member update their own records it doesn’t rely on first a contact remembering to notify a change of detail and secondly the information being updated in Outlook Gmail. Bernard also values the qualitatively differentiated contact, anyone on your contact list is by definition high quality so some of the heavy listing in terms of networking has already occurred.

So far so good, but there’s plenty of reasons why this will never fly;

  • Walled gardens - sure LinkedIn might open up their network but using their platform as an outlook/Gmail replacement is (almost) as proprietary as it comes
  • LinkedIn is business specific - I’m not sure about Bernard but my Gmail contacts run to around 2.5k individuals. Some business (and bear in mind I’m involved in several different businesses), some personal friends, some family friends - I want to be able to email anyone from my email app - it therefore needs to only to be neutral and open, but it also needs to be use agnostic - LinkedIn is by definition geared towards business use
  • Out of network email - Bernard suggests that, as email standards are open, LinkedIn could handle email outside of the LinkedIn network. In doing so LinkedIn would have negated any benefits of their in house email offering and would have recreated Gmail - why would LinkedIn dilute its special sauce just to compete with a product Google gives away?
  • Part of the compelling reason to use Outlook/Gmail is the scheduling functionality - it doesn’t make much sense for LinkedIn to recreate this but not having that offering is a deal breaker to most users

Sorry Bernard but I reckon you’re right off the mark on this one.

Now, Bernard does make some other good points. Fact is that Gmail as a free offering is just a little scary from the reliability, continuity and security point of view. There needs to be another solution that is paid for, web based and enterprise grade. Oh yeah - there is.

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