In our second episode of TalkCrunch we talk to LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman and August Capital VC David Hornik about social networks on the web. We also talk a bit about the main news from the past week, and other topics such as web video and podcasting. Podcast hosted by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and Nik Cubrilovic
Notes:
- Web 2.0 news – companies mentioned: DabbleDB, Digg and recent fundraising (SixApart, FMPub, PodTech)
- Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn profitability and the ability to view Linkedin profiles without being logged in
- What is Social Networking 3.0?
- Microformats and social networking
- Web Identity: porting of Linkedin reputation and profile
- Podcast ends with discussion of VideoEgg, YouTube and user-generated content in general
Runtime 43:40m, Download 10.2MB
Thanks David and Reid for joining us this morning for the podcast.
We spent a lot of time today removing pauses and “ummms” from the podcast – mostly mine. It turns out that 9 am on a Sunday is not a good time to fire up the brain, especially when you’ve only gone to bed a few hours earlier. Much better to record these things in the evening.
I look forward to listening on my way to work tomorrow, as I’ve enjoyed your appearances on Steve Gillmor’s shows.
I have a technical request. It would be best if you encoded the audio at 44kHz instead of 11kHz. I think Adam Curry and crew figured out that sticking with 44kHz works with all the devices. You can turn the bitrate down to 64kbps and still get listenable audio.
Thanks,
Leon
The audio quality needs to be improved and more constant between speakers; however, you don’t need to worry about the content – you guys are fascinating.
Leon, I think you are right – I will be re-encoding it tonight. Thanks.
Michael,
I found the discussion of social networks interesting, but I’m a bit turned-off with the excessive coinage of terms. “Social Networks 3.0″ is yet another nebulous term that isn’t much different than the vague notion that is “Web 2.0″.
Some of the factors that comprise your concept of a “Social Network 3.0″ app are those that are already considered tenants of “Web 2.0″, such as information portability via things such as Microformats, and “The Web as a Platform (TM)” via building other applications ontop of social networks (accomplished already through things such as APIs).
Let’s not build another house-of-cards term. These buzzwords always wind up in the hands of tech-illiterate businessmen and managers who then mandate their products or contractors integrate “Web 2.0″ or “Social Network 3.0″ ideas – and that only serves to limit creativity through incomprehensible dogma. These buzzwords are empty and meaningless, and even worse, they’re accessible to non-developers and non-designers, who proceed to fling this bull around like they actually know what they’re speaking about.
Please don’t make another bubble through buzz. If anything, “Web 2.0″ is another crack at the web with technologists rather than the businessmen behind the wheel. It’s not rounded corners, DOM scripting, asynchronous javascript, or accessibility. It’s professionals doing their job correctly.
Cheers,
Rob
Well done on a great podcast guys. Loved the coverage of LinkedIn. Only issue I had is that there was a little feedback when people were talking (especially Mike for some reason).
– Clay
Rob – I hear you and I don’t disagree. However, there is some interesting stuff going on in this space, and it’s clearly a generation later than the old stuff. Nik brought up some excellent points in the podcast when he steered it towards open formats and decentralized profiles – and some hard questions in that regard were asked to Reid. Whatever we call it, good things are happening.
Clay – The call was done on a pots concall number, but Nik called in via skype out and I called in from Vonage. The interesting thing is that Nik is pretty clear throughout the podcast, whereas my voice was at very low quality. Good for skype, bad for vonage. Although in vonage’s defense, I need to check what bandwidth priority I’ve set it at on the dashboard.
I have been using Videoegg with my Typepad blog for a while now and just tried Youtube (for uploading) and to be honest, I like Videoegg more. One of the bigger differences that I like about Videoegg is that it gives feedback on how the upload is going. With videoegg you have no idea!
JMTC
Molly
http://www.mollyzine.com
A very interesting discussion !!!
For me social networks have remained something like a flash in the pan, they generate interest for the initial period and then fade away. Be it LinkedIn or Orkut, I have not found enough reason to keep on investing time into these networks regularly. Both have allowed me to get in touch with people whom I had lost touch with, but have rarely got me in touch with new people.
In this light Reid Hoffman’s comment that one’s LinkedIn profile might be searchable on Google seemed a genuine step forward in making discovery within an established network easier.
Another way of making discovery easier would probably be through common events attended.
And yet another thing which would probably ease introduction rather than discovery would probably be assigning some kind of responsiveness quotient to each member in the database.
Sriyansa
This is good stuff and if I can have something like this to listen to every Monday morning, that’s great! You probably have plans, but I think you should start early in making transcripts available and having microchunks searchable and listenable on this site. (I don’t know what best practice is but maybe you delay searching/transcripts by a week after each episode.) I’m sure there’s a startup that should/would jump all over it to help out if that’s their vision of finding quality audio on the web.
Excellent! I’m really loving these podcasts – thanks for taking the time to create them.
There are far too many interesting topics here to respond to them all, but a few points:
*LinkedIn: aggregating content from blogs (in other words, becoming an edge aggregator), seems like a very limited opportunity for them right now – and probably in the long term, too. They’d be better to focus on the outputs – APIs, mashups, widgets, portable reputation. (Yes, portable reputation is a sticky problem, and we also spoke to eBay way back when we investigated the feasibility of portable reputations. Suffice to say, it doesn’t make economic sense for them to open up anytime soon. What’s more, it’s not clear to me whether the winner in the portable reputation space will be hugely profitable. Perhaps an existing player like LinkedIn could use it to cement their postion as an identity provider – in other words, the biggest reward is gaining prominence, not monetizing the reputation system directly. I’m not convinced that iKarma and Opinity can make it work.)
*Re: Microformats – we all know that getting an agreement on standards is a hassle. Most companies will stay away until someone else fixes the problem. Classic chicken and egg.
*VideoEgg should position itself as an edge feeder – it can’t win against YouTube, but it can become the de facto way to get video on to the network. It seems like they’re already pursuing this strategy – good on them.
*YouTube is headed for trouble on the copyright side, but I don’t think it will kill them off.
*Yes! Finally someone mentions Cafepress. Peer production is about much more than news and media.
Good stuff. I really like the podcast format so that one can consume the conversation whenever, wherever—as Nik had mentioned. I particularly enjoyed David’s comments on user-generated physical goods. It will be interesting over the next year or two to see what interesting innovations surface—and I suspect we’ll see a lot more action here.
Great podcast! I really enjoy following the Web 2.0 developments on the Techcrunch website and the podcast certainly adds to that enjoyment.
I have one request/comment though. The 40-45 minutes continues discussion is to long. Try to segment the discussion to 3 times 15 minutes. I listen to the podcast in the car, metro or on the bike or another time when I have a break. Those moments when I have time to listen to the show are usually not more that 15 minutes a piece. It’s hard to stop and get back into the same discussion at a later point in time. Segmenting would help.
Greetings,
ManfredZ
Great show. Like the other listeners, I would bump up the bit rate.
Hi guys,
Where’s the feed? Am I being stupid but I can’t seem to find the RSS for this.
Thanks,
Paul
Hi Paul, It’s linked from the orange button under “subscribe” in the far right sidebar. Here’s the link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Talkcrunch
I listen to a lot of podcasts and this one needs to imrove rapidly in both sound quality and design if it wants to get really popular. It would be a shame to see this one fall short of its potential because it has a lot going for it when it comes to articulate, intelligent discussion of what is going on in the world of web applications.
Please take this as constructive criticism. I’d love you to get this right because I’d like to be able to enjoy the content.
Podcasts range from the super cheesy (e.g. New Scientist podcast) to the high brow monotone. You want to aim somewhere in the middle but it has to be kept quite lively and structured.
Talkcrunch is very dry and at the monotone end. It is not anchored by any one individual with a “radio personality”. It rambles a lot and goes on for too long given the small number of items discussed on each ‘cast.
The intro sequence does not work – I think I’m listening to a rock show and the title gets announced too late, then there is a sudden volume drop and then I get an unclear monotone voice in my left ear only for ages until it all shifts to the centre.
Please sort out your audio technology and design for the show (call Leo for some tips?), but keep the subject matter, quality of contributors and level of sophistication of the discussion.
Dunno if this was fixed in episode 3 (haven’t gotten there yet), but I couldn’t listen to episode 2 on my iPod because Mike was coming only in my left earbud, and when you are walking around crowded/loud streets, its impossible to hear when its coming into only one ear.
Go buy a windscreen, please.
I have the same problem as Justin, Episode #2 is Mono and impossible to listen to on my iPod Nano, unless in complete silence.
The later episodes do not have this problem.
Is there any chance you can splice Episode #2 into stereo for re-download?