Need to call a meeting at short notice? As practical as online conferences may be, you still usually need to download some kind of software and create an account before sending email invitations including a link and access code. This is where the XING application spreed, developed by Struktur AG in Stuttgart, comes into play. The term spreed was coined from the words spread and speed as all it takes to start a conference is a click on the ad-hoc presentation in a XING user’s profile.

Once all of the participants have joined the conference, spreed offers all of the options available with conventional online meetings such as mediated and unmediated chats, documentation presentations, desktop application presentations, jointly usable whiteboards, mind mapping, a survey module, attendance lists, and much more. In addition, web meeting participants can have an international presence thanks to an integrated telephone conference and the option of recording meetings. It doesn’t matter whether you are holding a project meeting, training session, webinar, customer support, staff training or job interviews – spreed can meet all of these needs.

XING added the spreed application in July 2009 with tens of thousands of users already enjoying the benefits of spreed web meetings. Anyone who adds the spreed application to his or her XING profile can take advantage of a free web meeting with up to three people (including non-XING members). Premium Members can also hold telephone conferences, give ad-hoc presentations, and organize meetings with up to five people. The spreed application will run on a Mac, Windows PC or Linux operating system.

People who use spreed meetings also make an active contribution to the environment. The graphic below shows a global meeting that saved 283,075 kilometers of travel.

In today’s hectic times, spreed also has another excellent benefit – You can do more in less time, so you’re free to do other things.

Just add the spreed app to your profile and try it for yourself. I look forward to reading your comments in my XING group or receiving a personal message on XING.

Your spreed expert,

Tina Buhr

The principle behind this system is just as intuitive as the one in XING Jobs: You install an application, try it out – and then rate it with just one click of your mouse on the main page (“canvas view”, where the app takes up almost the whole screen). You can of course go back and change your rating later, for instance if you’re impressed by a new feature that is added.

We will then extract average ratings from all user feedback and list the best-rated apps in the Applications Directory. This way you’ll be able to see at a glance what XING users think of a particular app. When installing a new application, you will also see how your contacts rated it, giving you a better idea of whether it is suited to your needs and interests or not.

What’s more: You can now also recommend applications to your contacts if you’d like to draw them to their attention.

This combination of ratings and recommendations brings our XING Partner Ecosystem even closer together with the rest of our platform, making it easier still for you to make full use of all the XING and your network has to offer.

Why did that person click on my profile?

If you’re like me, you’re probably curious about what motivates Visitors to your profile. You’ll be happy to know that starting today, we provide more information when a XING member visits your profile by clicking from an OpenSocial app such as “Ask XING”. You can use this additional information to help you decide whether the person could be a valuable contact to you or not.

Simplified access to home page apps

Easy access to the applications right from the start.

Since the launch of the XING Partner Ecosystem, we offer a total of 16 applications on the XING platform to enrich your networking experience. And there are different ways to view and use apps. You can either display the apps directly on your home page in what we at XING like to call an “info box”, or, by clicking on the “more” button, you can view the larger and more customizable “canvas view”.

Now it’s easier than ever to get to this “canvas view”: on your home page, there is now a small “Applications” option in the right menu bar. It expands when you click on it, and you can choose one of the applications from those you have installed. If you have a lot of applications installed, this can be particularly helpful – also if your home page is full of other boxes.

Simplified invitations

Up until now, you’ve been able to invite your coworkers or friends to join XING from your home page – all you needed to do was to enter your friend’s email. This is still possible, of course, but now it’s even easier to invite several members at once.

Invite contacts you email.

If you use one of the email services popular with other XING users on the platform, namely hotmail, GMX or web.de, you can sync all your contacts directly with XING, and expand your network in a hurry. Each person you invite will get a free Premium Month – and until September 29, you’ll get a free Premium Month yourself for every three successful invitations. If you prefer, you can also sync your address book from the “full screen” Invitation Page.

Standardized Company Profiles

Our Company Profiles will also go through a round of modifications this week (changes have already been made to the database, and the platform will be updated overnight). We’ve compiled duplicate Company Profiles into one, using public information such as trade office registers, and ironed out any spelling inconstancies resulting from individual profiles. Starting immediately there will be one Company Profile per company on XING, as requested by our users in UserVoice. It goes without saying that member profiles are not affected by this change. With this change, Company Profiles become more a more reliable record of coworkers and employees at companies.

Questions? Feel free to ask them, either here or in the XING Group.

We’re constantly improving our entire platform – thanks to your feedback. This week, our own OpenSocial apps are getting a few tune-ups.

More clarity on Ask XING

For some time now, our popular app “Ask XING” asks you to type in at least one topic when you submit a new question. This makes it easier for members to find questions, and improves the structure.

In addition to that, we’ve listened to the request of many members and added a full text search. Just enter your search term, and you’ll see the questions that match. You can now also choose a topic from a drop-down list. With both new functions, you can also filter the results so you only see the questions asked by your contacts.

Hot topics on Twitter Buzz

If you’re a Twitter user, you’re bound to know the popular topic cloud on the homepage – often referred to as “trending topics” – that clue you in to what’s hot with Twitter users at the moment. Now we’ve added a similar feature to Twitter Buzz: “Hot topics” lets you see which topics are getting the most tweets from Twitter Buzz users on XING. By clicking on one of these topics, you’ll also automatically add it to your personal tweet topic filter.

The logo from "IE6 must die!"

Oh, how we would love to shout: “IE6 must die!”. (Did you hear about the twitter movement? Or about this action from more than 70 websites?) Oh, how we would like to make our platform available in black and white to all Internet Explorer users (for the small proportion of the online world who remember the changeover from black and white TV to color…). But alas this is a helpless battle of the honorable Web Don Quixotes against the electronic windmills of the great multinationals of this world.

Why all this fluster you may ask? Here’s the reason:

Over the past few weeks we have been monitoring which browsers our members use to surf our site. I had to laugh a little when I read recently in a Web gazette that 11.7% of Germans still used IE6. I didn’t realize the figure could be pinpointed so precisely!

So here’s our precise data for the last seven days:

Overview of browsers used for XING.

This graph shows usage of the different major browsers against time shown on the horizontal axis. The green area at the bottom – representing usage of IE6 – is particularly interesting here. Its structure reveals three things immediately:

1. IE6 is not used very much at the weekend.
2. Chinese users, a high proportion of which use IE6, surf the platform during the European night.
3. During working hours on weekdays, members using IE6 exceeds the 20% mark.

So why is this? Well, because IE6 is so prevalent still in so many large corporations. I know from previous companies I have worked in how reluctant firms can be to switch browsers when the current one is connected up to anything from 50 to several hundred Internet applications, all of which have to work every single day. At tens of thousands of work stations throughout an organization.

It isn’t worth pestering users to switch either, as they very often don’t have administrative access to their work computer. And the administrators in large companies often don’t have the remit or the budget to carry out a changeover on all computers in a company. And if I was CEO of a large firm I think I’d probably be hesitant about initiating such an infrastructural project with uncertain risks in a completely heterogeneous environment.

To sum up: It seems that Internet Explorer 6 is (regrettably) here to stay, for as long as it still operates on current Windows operating systems at least.

… Come to think of it, XING in black & white might well have a certain retro, futuristic charm about it.

Now you can recommend companies.

Just click on the “Recommend this company” link in the upper-right hand corner of a Company Profile to send a message. And while we’re on the topic of messages: we’ve also given a facelift to the incoming message interface.

And finally, we’ve improved the settings for our “Ask XING” app. Now you can choose whether or not you wish to follow questions you asked as well as those other people have asked. In order to make it easier to sort questions, you’ll now be asked to enter at least one topic for each question.

Now you can recommend a single tweet on our app Twitter Buzz. This tweet will then appear in your contacts’ “What’s new in my network” box.

What’s more: The “What’s new in my network” box also reports on profile attachments, which went live for Premium members last week.

After adding file attachments and birthday reminders last week, we’re now giving our Premium Members more for their money. In the future, we’ll continue to work to make Premium Membership more attractive than ever.

These four partners are currently offering XING Premium members some extra goodies: Huddle, Mindmeister, Spreed and Zcope.

Huddle

Huddle offers XING Premium Members two ad-free workspaces, 1.5 GB storage space and an unlimited number of participants free of charge (for other members, the standard is 1 workspace with 1 GB storage). Also check out the guest post from Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell. Furthermore, XING Premium Members receive a discount of €6 when they upgrade to a Huddle Premium package.

MindMeister Mind Mapping

XING Premium Members have access to 50% more mind maps on MindMeister than basic members and can use the map view ad-free. Furthermore, XING Premium Members receive a discount of 20% when they upgrade to a MindMeister Premium package.

Spreed Meetings

Every XING member has access to a spreed online conference room for free web meetings with up to three participants. Premium Members can conduct several meetings with up to five participants, and also organize teleconferences (with a local call-in number for Germany).

Zcope

Basic members can start three projects on Zcope, while XING Premium Members can start five projects. Furthermore, Premium Members have access to 100 MB of storage (basic members 10 MB).

There’s more to come

In the future, we hope to work with even more partners who offer something special to our Premium Members. If you’re a developer and would like to see your app on XING, go ahead, start thinking about what you might offer – and please contact us at opensocial@xing.com. If you have further questions regarding partner Premium bonuses, please contact the partner directly.

Tungle is proud to be one of the first Open Social apps released on the Xing platform, and the only app that syncs with your existing e-calendar to bring click-to-meet technology to your Xing profile (see the full press release).

What’s Tungle.me?

Tungle.me is the simplest way to make meetings happen. It brings a widget into your profile that shows your real time availability and lets members of your network schedule meetings with you.

Here’s how it works

A visitor to your profile checks out your Applications tab and clicks your Tungle.me app. They see when you’re free and can send you a meeting invitation proposing multiple times to meet. You get the invitation by email and simply pick a time to book the meeting.

You get full control over who and when you meet.

Syncing with your calendar

The best part is that Tungle syncs with your existing e-calendar so you don’t have to manually update anything. Your real time availability is pulled right from your calendar (the Xing app only displays your free/busy schedule – not your meeting details).

If you choose to accept a meeting invitation and pick one of the proposed times, it will be automatically added to your calendar for you.

Tungle.me syncs with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal and Entourage for Mac.

About Tungle

Tungle.me is one feature of the full Tungle Accelerate package that accelerates your e-calendar to allows you to easily schedule meetings, publish your free/busy schedule and share your calendar inside or outside your company, across time zones and platforms.

When you install the Tungle.me app for Xing, you also get a full free Tungle account. Learn more about Tungle.

To get Tungle.me for your Xing profile, get it in the Xing Apps directory.

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.

In the age of social networking, email is no longer an adequate collaboration tool. Enter Huddle Workspaces, your own private and secure workspaces, on XING to help you work with your connections.

We have developed Huddle Workspaces specifically for XING and the launch of its Partner Ecosystem. XING is leading the way in business networking and Huddle Workspaces will make it easier for XING members to work better together on projects or brainstorm with new ventures.

Huddle Workspaces include all the key features of Huddle, our network of secure online workspaces that is currently used by companies including P&G, Kia Motors, Pearson and Nokia. Huddle is currently available in English, German, French and Italian, with more languages to follow.

Huddle Workspaces offer XING members secure workspaces to privately share information and work together with their connections. All users receive 1GB of free space where they can:

• Store and share files
• Collaborate on documents
• Create private discussions

With Huddle Workspaces, documents can be created and edited online, users may also post comments and request approvals. Tasks, whiteboards, phone and web conferencing are available upon linking with a free, full Huddle.net account.

Premium XING members automatically receive a premium version of Huddle, with more workspaces and no ads. In addition, existing Huddle users, who are XING members, will benefit from a discount on their Huddle premium membership.

Here are a few examples how you can use Huddle Workspaces on XING:

If you a group leader, you can:

• Manage group communication and share content in a private workspace
• Share confidential information with your group’s management team
• Large group? Segment content for your members by inviting them to different workspaces
• Help group members share documents and collaborate with fellow members

A recruiter?

• Privately discuss candidates’ CVs with potential employers
• Improve recruiter-candidate communication
• Arrange and monitor discussions with a candidate and employer
• Get online approvals and comments on CVs

If you’re looking for new staff on XING:

• Store details of potential candidates, feedback forms and comments securely online
• Store and share candidates’ CVs with your team
• Manage your recruitment agencies centrally

Huddle Workspaces are great for managing your board communications:

• Store, share and edit board meetings and confidential documentation
• Discuss issues between meetings in a secure workspace
• Run virtual meetings
• Share briefs and documents with service provides i.e. lawyers

You can add Huddle Workspaces to your XING profile here.