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

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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