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Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn's news feed better without Twitter

Big surprise: The LinkedIn founder says LinkedIn is better off sans Twitter.

Paul Sloan Former Editor
Paul Sloan is editor in chief of CNET News. Before joining CNET, he had been a San Francisco-based correspondent for Fortune magazine, an editor at large for Business 2.0 magazine, and a senior producer for CNN. When his fingers aren't on a keyboard, they're usually on a guitar. Email him here.
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Paul Sloan

Reid Hoffman speaking at Techcrunch Disrupt CNET/Dan Farber

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Twitter cut off the connection to LinkedIn in July, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman said he assumed there would be a backlash.

Instead, the reaction was the opposite.

Also from TechCrunch Disrupt

LinkedIn feeds "got much better," said LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who was interviewed by Michael Arrington at Techcrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. "...because it was so, 'I'm having a latte, at a 49ers game,' ...where LinkedIn is primarily about business."

Twitter, which has been cutting off some third-developers, shut out LinkedIn so that that people's tweets no longer show up on their LinkedIn news feeds. The two companies had had a relationship with since 2009.

At first, said Hoffman, "we were alarmed... one of the things that we wanted was the liquidity of the set of a status updates, and thought that it was a natural part of the Twittersphere." But, he said, "We were pleasantly surprised at the fact that the product got better."

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