by Ingo Chao and Christopher Blum

Our start page after logging in got faster. It takes significantly less time until the user can interact with the application. (more…)

Just before we enter an A-MAY-XING (couldn’t resist either) month of product innovations and optimizations ahead, as our CPO Jason Goldberg just outlined in his latest post, today’s last April release sees a few minor improvements go live as well. (more…)

Remember just a few weeks ago when we discussed our new product development model at XING, Ship it!  Well, May is already stacking up to be a big Ship it! month at XING as we’ve fast-tracked a number of user-facing features which will hit the XING website in May.  In total, we already know of more than ten significant enhancements and new features set to go live on XING in May 2009. (more…)

You might be open to changing your employer if the right offer came your way. Maybe you are actively thinking about starting a new chapter in your career, or perhaps you have been forced to start looking for a new job having being made redundant. Whatever your situation, your XING profile can make a big difference to your chances of getting hired. (more…)

Hello everyone! My name is Karsten Rieke, and I’ve been a Product Manager at XING since 2007. Actually, my association with Europe’s leading business network started before that, both as a member, and as an HTML and CSS expert and front end web developer during the name switch from openBC to XING. (more…)

One of the most interesting and simultaneously most powerful functions available to XING Premium Members is the Powersearch. There are a number of special search functions, all of which can be very helpful for maintaining a contact network.  Some of these functions are also available to basic members. It’s worthwhile to spend some time and play around with the Powersearch: the results are often very helpful, and almost always a lot of fun. I’d like to spend a moment and introduce some of my favorite Powersearches: (more…)

As with most web 2.0 platforms, a large part of the platform interaction on XING is handled via JavaScript. In total, 25,000 lines of code render dynamic content on our platform. Dragging and dropping the boxes of your start page, editing settings in your profile, a live search selecting your contacts when you type a new message – AJAX is just about everywhere. (more…)

From 20,000 to a half million: Today the number of members who have access to our new Company Pages will increase by a factor of 25, ringing in the release of one of our major product innovations this spring. You may be wondering, what led to this new category in the header bar?

As has often been the case in the past, it started with our members. Repeatedly they pointed out that although companies appear in many spots on XING, they do not have profiles of their own. Several months ago, a few of my coworkers in product development and I were asked to do an initial analysis on the topic of “Companies on XING”. (more…)

My name is Ulrike Gruel. I have been working at XING for nearly thirty months now, two years of which I spent in community management, listening to the concerns and wishes of XING users. Since last November, I work as a product manager to coordinate the developments on our platform to fit users’ needs better and better.

Whenever we release new features on a Wednesday like this, we talk about some enhancements hidden within the machinery that you do not even notice actively. This week, things are the other way around: we make features that appeared deeply hidden more visible and accessible to you – the preferences and privacy settings. (more…)

Hi everyone.

Last week I wrote my first blog post for XING as the company’s new Chief Product Officer, introducing our new concept of “Ship it!”.

Ship it! is all about building the future of XING with our users.  Under the Ship it! model, we will launch new products and enhancements on the XING website faster than ever before in a rapid agile development model and then gather user feedback on how to make our products better.  Ship It! means we will launch products early in their lifecycle, before they are finished, and then work with you to evolve them and improve them. (more…)

Changing an underlying layer of an IT infrastructure involves a similar level of risk to whipping away a lightly stained table cloth from underneath a set of beautiful porcelain china: The worst-case scenario is a heap of priceless family heirlooms on the floor; if things turn out right nobody will notice a thing – except perhaps that everything looks a little more spick and span.

Today, XING members have had several new proverbial table cloths laid for them: we’ve been busy cleaning up parts of the database of our event invitations, which we speed things up in this part of the site. (more…)

OpenSocial, Google’s API for social networks, has been around the web for quite a while now. Within the last months, the gadget-oriented framework ’socialized’ well and, knowing Google’s and the web’s social networks’ power, will continue do so. XING has been working on the integration of OpenSocial since 2007.

At the moment, we are just a few laps away from launching the platform, driving in 6^th gear all the way. Working with this company, I witness how tremendously fast the wheel is turning. My colleague Karsten Rieke and I recently published an article that will be printed in the Informatik Spektrum, a German-speaking informatics periodical. Our article is one of the first comprehensive academic publications on the subject. (more…)

One of our major targets for this year is to grow our network and become more international, opening up more and more opportunities for our members to profit from new contacts. Along these lines, we updated the list of online email service providers which in the Address Book Comparison and bulk invitation functions. (more…)