XING Labs is launched

XING Labs is now live! For our particularly fervent and adventuresome users out there,the XING Engineering innovation site is now live at http://labs.xing.com. We use XING Labs to make smaller projects and prototypes available to the public in an experimental, but controlled setting.

We hope that this provides our customers with a chance to see, explore, and share feedback on our projects at a very early stage, long before the beta stage.

Usage and security tips

You don’t need a special registration to use XING Labs projects, your normal XING Account suffices. A lot of the new features and functions are Premium-only, however.

The English-language apps at XING Labs are run in encrypted form in our own computing sites, and the projects are exclusively limited to those by XING developers. This means that you can experiment in safety: no information is passed along to third parties.

Experiments fail at least half the time

If you still have memories of overflowing beakers and test tubes in Chemistry class, you’ll also keep in mind that experiments do go wrong some times. So let’s get one thing clear from the beginning: some experiments have unintentional consequences, and for this reason we reserve the right to deactivate projects at any time, and just because something is live on XING Labs, does not mean it will ever migrate to the XING platform.

By nature, experimental features are unfinished, and the bugfinding stage helps us develop the product into a more stable form. There may also be registration limitations, for example invitation-only features.

For those experimentally-minded folks out there, XING Labs will launch with Xwitter, a simple web tool for syncing XING and Twitter status updates. We’ll be adding other projects on a continual basis.