Here at XING we’ve been working on implementing OpenSocial since 2007. In May 2009 we launched the first XING applications on our platform, and have also hosted apps from third-party providers as part of the XING Partner Ecosystem since July 22. Our partner applications add a number of business-relevant functions to the XING platform such as online conferences, project management, calendars and presentations.

And it’s not just our partners who are driving things forward – we are also continually developing the system. You can read about the latest developments in our weekly Release Flash which lets you know about all of the improvements we have made to our apps. For the last few weeks we’ve been working on a monster of a project which involved updating the XING OpenSocial infrastructure from version 0.8 to 0.9. This may only seem like a small step, but in fact it’s a proverbial giant leap for the infrastructure. (more…)

The latest version of our BlackBerry app was released along with a number of improvements for the OAuth interface, which you need to invite your email contacts, for example. And that’s not all – today we’ve also provided a number of minor optimizations including the much-improved ‘Print profile’ function.

Being able to print out your profile and other XING member profiles, which are inserted into our style sheets to visually adjust the layout, is of course nothing new. But now we have tweaked the corresponding CSS data and enhanced it even further so that a profile printout can also be used as a large professional business card complete with résumé.

We have also added a ‘Print profile’ button which is located on the right-hand side under ‘Options’. Of course you can only print out contact information for people whose profiles are visible to you, and vice versa.

In July 2009 we launched our BlackBerry application. Since then we have been monitoring which functions have proven most popular and evaluated all of the great feedback we received from users. As a result of this, we have now finished developing version 1.5, which adds to or improves various aspects of the app. All of the previous features such as searching within your own contacts, finding people on XING, synchronization with the BlackBerry address book, and mobile status messaging are of course still available.

Save Time, Money and Traffic

Optimized data management is one of the new developments and is now far more efficient with less data being automatically loaded. This in turn helps to reduce the level of traffic generated and not only leads to increased execution speeds, but can also help to put off the speed reduction that a number of providers enforce when users exceed a certain monthly data volume. This of course helps to save money when roaming. (more…)

XING is a household name when it comes to business networking, while Outlook is a core feature of business correspondence. So what could be more logical than to link these two key business components? Do you want to see the latest developments and news about your XING network, and receive automatic contact details updates? If so, that’s precisely what the Outlook Social Connector will do when released. As things stand, the Connector is expected to be available for downloading from http://www.xing.com/outlook from mid-June 2010.

The XING plug-in for the Outlook Social Connector offers the following features: (more…)

Editor’s note: This article by Tina Buhr, Business Development Strukur AG /Spreed, is part of a series on the XING Partner Ecosystem where OpenSocial apps developers have an opportunity to present their applications.

Need to call a meeting at short notice? As practical as online conferences may be, you still usually need to download some kind of software and create an account before sending email invitations including a link and access code. This is where the XING application spreed, developed by Struktur AG in Stuttgart, comes into play. The term spreed was coined from the words spread and speed as all it takes to start a conference is a click on the ad-hoc presentation in a XING user’s profile.

Once all of the participants have joined the conference, spreed offers all of the options available with conventional online meetings such as mediated and unmediated chats, documentation presentations, desktop application presentations, jointly usable whiteboards, mind mapping, a survey module, attendance lists, and much more. In addition, web meeting participants can have an international presence thanks to an integrated telephone conference and the option of recording meetings. It doesn’t matter whether you are holding a project meeting, training session, webinar, customer support, staff training or job interviews – spreed can meet all of these needs. (more…)

Editorial comment: This MaximiXING article is by Vivian rather than Silke Schippmann, who we hope will get well soon!

Anyone who has been a member at XING for some time may well have looked at someone’s profile or a message they wrote and immediately thought “So that’s how they tick”. This is by no means intended to sound negative, and we certainly don’t want people to pigeonhole others, but characterizations can actually help to facilitate communication by adjusting our expectations. After monitoring this for some time, we have identified four common categories of people on our platform: (more…)

This week’s new developments include a mini facelift of our OpenSocial app Ask XING where you can now see all of the frequently used actions (Answer question/Forward question/Follow question) at a glance without having to move the cursor to the question. Other interaction options such as ‘Report as inappropriate’ can be found by clicking on the ‘More’ button on the right.

As part of our ‘De-De-Anonymizing’ drive we have now made changes to the Groups link structure. By dynamically adding a random number, the address in the RSS feed of ‘What’s new in your network’ changed more often and previously read messages about users who joined a group appeared as ‘new’ messages. These problems have now been rectified. (more…)

You’ve probably experienced something similar in the past while using the XING platform – certain areas you were well acquainted with suddenly looked completely different. Perhaps an input field had moved, a button name had changed, or the site had been redesigned? Perhaps tomorrow things will be back to how they were in the past. What’s going on? Some areas may even look completely different on a colleague’s screen to yours. What’s that all about? Is it some kind of half-baked design or poorly designed bananaware intended to come of age when with the customer? No, you’re not even close.

So what exactly is it then?

As is customary within our industry, we perform so-called A/B tests on various parts of our platform, meaning that one group of XING users (A) sees a certain interface or function while a control group (B) is presented with a variant offering the same functionality but with different visuals. There is no opt-in or opt-out – the system assigns users to the groups, everything else would lead to inconsistent test results. (more…)

Here at XING, agile software development in the form of SCRUM and Kanban has already proven successful. I wanted to use this experience to find out whether ‘agile work’ can be transferred to our internal IT system using Kanban, covering mail server maintenance tasks through to ad hoc support for staff with notebook issues.

The Kanban principle means that the team takes on tasks which are then handled by more than one team member. Our developers call this form of teamwork ‘pair programming’, which we have used to coin the term ‘pair doing’. (more…)

The annual World Economic Forum meeting took place a while back, but we’re still receiving messages from users irritated by what they heard there on the topic of social networking and privacy. ‘Old People’s Issues’ was the term used by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman when talking about people’s concerns involving privacy within social networks. German users appear to be particularly sensitive to the subject, and Jeff Jarvis wrote about the ‘German privacy paradox’ in his blog after noticing that the Germans worry a lot about various privacy aspects when online, but are all too ready to strip off all their clothes and head for the sauna. (more…)