The first OpenSocial applications go live on XING!

Hi everyone.

I’m thrilled to announce that earlier today the first two OpenSocial applications went live on XING!

The OpenSocial framework enables XING and its partners to rapidly launch applications that enrich the XING user experience by tapping into the social-graph of relationships on XING. Put simply: XING and its partners can now build applications that provide enhanced functionality to XING’s members. XING’s members will immediately benefit from these applications as they will gain access to helpful tools, content, and services in a wide range of product categories. These applications are integrated into the XING platform and in doing so make use of XING’s members’ connectedness. The XING team will be building a number of applications ourselves while a number of partners will also be launching their own applications on XING via Open Social.

The first two applications launched earlier today were built by the XING team. We’ll be launching several partner applications in just a few weeks once we’ve learned from the experience of launching these 2 initial apps.

The first beta testers now have access to the apps, which will distribute virally on XING.

The two applications launched today are:

• XING News
• Ask XING

XING News, is a social news service offered in German, English, and Spanish. We’ll be adding support for Turkish later this week and Italian in the coming weeks. XING News leverages the socialmedian technology (socialmedian was acquired by XING earlier this year) and it is basically socialmedian on XING, enabling XING members to discover and sahre news from multiple sources filtered by their XING contacts, share stories of interest, discuss/comment, etc.

ASK Xing, enables XING members to ask questions and get answers by tapping into the the expertise of members of the XING network. Got a burning question? Need some industry advice? Ask XING makes it really easy to tap into the knowledge of XING’s members to instantly get answers to your most important business questions.

We’ve purposely put these applications out today in a “soft – launch” meaning that XING members can discover the applications and interact with them but we are not yet promoting them aggressively on the site. This “soft-launch” will enable us to monitor the applications while we plan for a broader release of open-social on XING.

We’ve also setup a feedback forum for XING’s members to provide input and suggestions on the apps.

Christina Neugeschwender was our product manager on XING News and Ask XING, building these apps with the socialmedian team. Christina will blog shortly with more details on these applications.

Matthias Häsel has been leading our OpenSocial platform development along with an awesome team of software developers. Matthias will be blogging shortly with more details on the open-social platform on XING and what you need to do if you want to become a partner.

Have fun using these first two apps. As always, please pass along your feedback and suggestions so we can make these applications work even better for you!