The XING team just keeps on growing and growing. There are now over 100 of us, and at last count we have a total of 21 different nationalities all working under one roof. The past few weeks have seen a fresh wave of new employees start at XING. We caught up with them and asked: How have the first few weeks been, and what do you like best about your new place of work?

Daniel (Member Relations): I’ve been really impressed by the overall work culture in the XING office. I received a very warm welcome from everyone, and they have all taken the time to help me out in the first few weeks whenever I had any questions. It’s not tough being the “new boy” at XING at all … I feel right at home in my team as well: I’m enjoying the direct contact with members and get great satisfaction from being able to help members with user-related issues.

Joaquín (Translation - Localization - Copywriting): Before starting I spent several years doing a similar job on a freelance basis from home. Lots of my friends were jealous of how I had the freedom to plan my daily work routine to suit me. But to be perfectly honest: Since I started at XING, I’ve found it much more exciting and rewarding to be in the midst of the action, as it were. I like the interaction with such a wide range of different people from different departments. And now I’ve found an apartment in Hamburg I couldn’t ask for anything more ...:)

Maren (Human Resources): I was made to feel at home right away. Life in the office is never boring with the diverse range of responsibilities I’ve been given. My coworkers all come from different countries and cultures as well, which provides another interesting dimension to my job. It was great to find from the very first day onwards just how friendly and relaxed the atmosphere in the office is – there is a real team morale.

We’ll be interviewing more new XING employees on openBLOG over the coming months. If you’re interested in working for XING as well, you can check out our list of job vacancies here.

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Hazel says

mynetworkvalue.com has been online now for about 3 weeks and to date over 21,000 people have taken the Network Value test!

This topic has also been fiercely discussed in blogs and forums in all four corners of the globe. Some articles made us laugh, some caused raised eyebrows, some made us throw our hands above our heads and some got us nodding our heads in agreement.
Here’s a short recap of some of the best snippets from your discussions:

In Germany, Robert Basic kick-started the discussion with his basic thinking blog. His article entitled “I’m a Cheap Networker” certainly got things fired up. Check it out here [Only available in German].

The career bible; best practice business blog and synaxon blog seemed to polarize the users somewhat – some found the test interesting, some felt deeply inspired and motivated and others shouted “show me the money”.

It wasn’t long until the site was picked up across the pond in various US blogs. Om Malik from Gigaom.com got the ball rolling. He admitted that his network value - although quite high - faded in comparison to Robert Scoble aka Facebook gazillionare. The best line has to be from Alex though: [The networkvalue test is]…”a great mental masturbation exercise.” Oooh err!

The site even got picked up in blogs in France, Spain, Italy and Holland to name but a few.

All in all – the website has got you guys thinking about your network and its value. The value of a network is not determined by quantity alone - it doesn't matter whether you have 100 contacts or 500 - it's the quality and heterogeneity that counts.

By the way it’s worth paying the site another visit – we’ve now integrated some nifty buttons. Take a look here
 

For those of you who are interested in reading more - here’s a few references that blogged our site (isn’t Technorati great?):

Webthinker
The Archer Pelican
myKEY IT
Andrey Golub Weblog
Social Networks around the world
Handelskraft (only in German)
Modes d’emploi (only in French)

As Nina announced some time ago, we've redesigned the PremiumWorld page from the ground up. This past week we’ve been dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s, and the new site launched today. We’ve put you, the members, at the center of the new design, making the site more user-friendly, with only two clicks from the start page to the offer page.

But the beauty of the new design is not just skin deep: even below the surface, you have an impact, as XING members decide which offers are hits and which are misses. The more popular an offer is, the more central it will appear in the overview. You can also subscribe to a newsletter for regular updates on new offers. PremiumWorld also features a new monthly top offer with special conditions for Premium Members. 

So feel free to browse through the new PremiumWorld offers, and recommend your favorites to some of your contacts.

As Daniela announced in June, today is the day: XING’s merchandising shop will go live! Industrious XING employees are working day and night to design and program the shop—after all, XING products have to meet high standards. Now networkers of all stripes can stock up on necessities for every occasion, and equip themselves with all the gadgets necessary for survival.

Whether you’re looking for a “decisionmaking aid” for your next meeting, the perfect XING T-shirt for your next XING live event, or a XING golfset for your business partner’s office, it’s all available in the XING Shop, along with other selected products for a number of occasions and settings.

Networking aficionados and XING fans will find everything the heart desires.

Click here to see more from the shop…

By the way: Whether or not you want to shop, it’s worth taking a look inside for another reason as well, namely because you might just win something. If you can tell us how many products are available in the XING Shop categories “Clothes&Accessories” and “Office”, you’ll be in the running for our XING Networking Packet, which we’ll raffle off from among the correct responses in one week. Just leave an answer here as a comment!

This week we would like to introduce the Community Relations department - let's hear about Silke's piece of XING (click to enlarge):

Hazel says

It goes without saying that everyone’s network has a certain “value”.  Your contacts can come in handy, when you’re facing new deals, jobs, employees, salary negotiations, etc. But how much is your network worth exactly? Based on numerous studies, research and experience – www.mynetworkvalue.com can give you an indication on how much your network is worth.

Our microsite is the basis for our new integrated marketing campaign, which has been running for over a week in Germany and soon to come in other European countries and the US. As a social network the monetary value of a network is a very exciting question and we hope we can fire up discussions and comparisons with our calculations. Below you can see an example of an online ad and a screenshot of the microsite.

Take the test now!

We at XING are happy to announce that groups are being upgraded, and we are launching the enhanced group product this Sunday, November 11.
Former basic groups will be merged with the Premium Group product, which will be free of charge from now on. What this means for you is that all basic groups are being upgraded with additional services and improved functionalities.
There’s more: on the re-designed groups overview page, you can now see which of your contacts are members of which groups. Group moderators can also be more creative in individualizing their group design.
So as you might expect with such a project, there will be a downtime of several hours this weekend  for the upgrade. This is no small feat, when you consider that we’re upgrading over 7,600 groups.  ;-)

Hope you keep getting the most out of the newly upgraded groups on XING!

Felix Menden, VP Product & Engineering:

You have just bought an iPhone and have no idea what to use it for? We suggest: Turn your iPhone into a networking engine. Just direct iPhone to iphone.xing.com and run your favorite business network with a fingertip. This Friday we will launch a dedicated mobile version of XING for the iPhone. It will contain the areas Start, Members, Messages, and Address Book in an iPhone-like fashion.

By making mobile internet easy to use, the iPhone creates a milestone on the road to convergence. XING is commited to its innovative DNA and has spent a lot of time lately tackling the iPhone topic. Actually, why does XING bother doing a dedicated version for the iPhone? Is the current XING mobile version not enough?

The answer is quite simple: A finger is not a mouse pointer.

This is why the current design of XING mobile works on an iPhone but does not optimally serve the user’s needs. Almost every website surfed with the iPhone is not prepared for it. That means a lot of scrolling, zooming, and accidentally hitting the wrong link. One gets used to it and it is definitely fun. But then compare it to a regular browser: the discovery is that on an iPhone the most time is wasted by navigating around on a single page instead of navigating between pages. Compare this user experience to the experience of a native iPhone application and you know what the situation is: Websites are optimized for the use with a regular browser and mouse pointer. Moreover, the current mobile portals are optimized for cursor-keys, cell phone keyboards, or blackberry balls - Not for touchscreens.

That is why the user interface of an iPhone is a new journey and an exciting task for a usability engineer. At XING we have taken this step by adapting to this novel user-interface and thus exploring a probable trend in human-computer interaction. The new interface gives an iPhone addict real value. Try it out!

Last week, we met Ruth from the TLC department. Now we'll hear a little bit about Karsten and his "Piece of XING" (click to enlarge).

Cindy Lu, COO XING China:

The XING Networking Festival was initiated in October 2006, with Lars and Dr. Song opening the first Networking Festival together in Shanghai. More than 400 Beijing members witnessed the opening ceremony via a live web link. Every year in October, XING China members celebrate their own Networking Festival by organizing social networking events, creating opportunities for members to come together, communicate and exchange in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. 

This year eleven city communities organized offline events in October, with two taking place in early November. These cities are Beijng, Shanghai, Tsingtao, Zhengzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Chongqing, Changsha, Wuhan, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Xi’an. The events in Beijing, Shanghai, Fuzhou and Changsha all took place on the same day (October 27), with hundreds of members participating. Here’s an impression from the Guangzhou get-together:

I met many interesting people from various different business areas, including real estate, security, internet, investment, food, the arts, electronics, media, etc. Some people had just returned to China for a new career opportunity from Italy, France and other countries, while some members had brought their company product along as lucky draw gift. We received a lot of positive feedback: Many members told me how much they enjoyed the real-life communication with others, and they enjoyed the friendly atmosphere created by the organizers and participants. A lawyer later posted in the XING community group that he did not believe in offline meetings for people networking online until he visited the XING event, where he made very good business contacts and enjoyed himself.

The event in Shanghai, which took place on the same day, was entitled "European Business in China", with both Chinese and foreign members attending. Mr. Gerard Engelkamp, GM of ORBIS China, was invited to give a speech on “European Business in China”. Here you can see his audience listening:

Afterwards members shared their experiences of doing business between Europe and China with one another. We are looking forward to October 2008 already!

Back in April, we announced plans for creating a XING API. What we couldn’t have foreseen then was how important APIs would become, or how quickly they would do so. The difficulties inherent in proprietary APIs—both from our perspective (coordinating with European privacy laws, rights management) and from a development standpoint (how many APIs can one developer learn?)—were substantial. To be on the safe side, we started with a Partner API and launched with Zoominfo.

The rest of the world was on to APIs as well: In September we met the Google evangelist Patrick Chanezon, and he invited us to participate in the OpenSocial initative. Right away, we recognized how powerful an open standard could be, and decided to support OpenSocial.

We at XING believe strongly in open standards. It’s a two-way street, a matter of working together rather than against each other. After all, if you look back in time, open systems have always led to greater success, from Linux to Apache to the Web itself. We’re happy to support developers who add value and boost productivity with their applications, and by adopting an open standard on XING, we’re allowing thousands of programmers to code for our platform, all using known web-standards of HTML & Javascript. Our members themselves can choose which applications they adopt—who better? The freedom of such an approach is infinitely superior to a walled garden approach.

Marc Andreesen, founder of netscape and now running the company Ning  put it perfectly by explaining the differences between the two approaches area:

In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

• "Containers" -- social networking systems like Ning, Orkut,  Hi5, Lnkedin, Plaxo, and Friendster, and...
• "Apps" -- applications that want to be embedded within containers -- for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.

This is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:

• With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a "container" -- "apps" can only run within Facebook itself.  In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.
• With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) -- those languages and APIs don't work anywhere other than Facebook -- and then the apps can only run within Facebook.  In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.

So we are very proud to be participating in this week's launch of Open Social. The platform is the web itself, we don't need another laywer in-between.