LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman discussed the removal of Twitter’s feeds from its product, even though it was not their decision.

Hoffman says at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco that its product is better off without all of the noise that cross-posting from Twitter brought. When Michael Arrington pushed Hoffman on stage to call the move “bullshit”, Hoffman certainly didn’t disagree. Pushing forward, Arrington tried to get him to say that the API shutdown was “bullshit,” but the two ended up settling on “partial bullshit”.

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. We were pleasantly surprised at the fact that the product got better.

Having said all of that, Hoffman did say that the company worked really hard to keep Twitter integrated into its offerings. It sounded like Facebook was way nicer to Hoffman.

The conversation on the platform has now become more business-focused, which makes complete sense when you think about all of the random things that you read on Twitter daily. It actually stopped me from using LinkedIn al-together, but since Twitter has been gone, I’ve been enjoying my return.

Of course, LinkedIn has done its own API-cutting, and this is a very real reality that developers are going to have to start preparing for.

It worked out for LinkedIn, but will it work out for everyone else that has made Twitter a big part of their product? Time will tell.

Crunchbase

• REID HOFFMAN

Person: Reid Hoffman

Companies: Greylock Partners, LinkedIn, Tagged, Kiva.org, West Coast Advisory Board, Intent Media, shopkick, Zynga, Winster, Swipely, Globant, Confinity, Jaxtr, Vendio

Reid Hoffman is a Partner at Greylock, and Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at LinkedIn. Reid joined Greylock Partners in 2009. His areas of focus include consumer Internet, enterprise 2.0, mobile, social gaming, online marketplaces, payments, and social networks. Reid likes to work with products that can reach hundreds of millions of participants and businesses that have network effects. An accomplished entrepreneur, executive and angel investor, Hoffman has played an integral part in building many of today’s leading consumer technology...

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