A Note on OpenSocial Views

Dear readers, dear XING members,

I’m excited to announce that now, with the launch of Travelload, yet another external application from the XING Partner Ecosystem went live.  As our Chief Product Officer Jason Goldberg already stated in his previous blog post, the Partner Ecosystem is based on OpenSocial.

In contrast to applications that have been developed for proprietary environments, OpenSocial applications are interoperable within the context of multiple networks and build on standard technologies such as HTML and JavaScript. For XING, OpenSocial presents a great opportunity to expand our existing functionalities with a host of additional third-party applications, without having to relinquish control over our members’ personal data in the process.

To use an application, you need to add it to your XING account through our Application Directory. Once you have done so, you can start interacting with this application. XING currently supports three different locations where applications are rendered. In the Opensocial standard, these locations are formally known as Views:

• The Home View of an application is displayed within a box on your XING home page (which, as you might know, is customizable). Applications may use this view to present you any updates on what is going on in that application, such as stock data from Wallstreet:Online, your contacts’ Dopplr trips, project updates from ZCOPE, your current Doodle polls, or your next Spreed meeting.
• The Canvas View is the main place where you can interact with the application and create content, such as taking part in a sueddeutsche.de quiz or uploading files to a Huddle workspace (I also recommend the post from Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell). You can reach the Canvas View in various ways, such as from your “My Applications” tab or the “More” link that you find within the Home View boxes on your home page.
• The Profile View can be found under the new “Applications” tab on your XING profile. This view is particularly useful when you have generated content within an application that you wish to present to other users. For instance, you might choose to present profile visitors your Tungle calendar, a Mindmeister mindmap that visualizes your skills and competencies, or a Powerpoint slideshow that you have uploaded in SlideShare. Note that not all the applications do have a Profile View.

In the upcoming weeks we do not only want to bring new applications to our platform, but also want to improve the existing ones with your help. UserVoice has proved to be the right tool for that: Just click on the big button labeled “feedback” on the right side to give us your ideas and suggestions and vote on them together with other XING members.