Yet another week has flown by and it is time once again for the release update. Today we’re going to take a closer look at the customized Company Profiles. More and more businesses are discovering the benefits of their Company Profile for themselves. At the same time, increasingly numbers of members are being naturally drawn to these pages as the word spreads. More than 4,000 members are already following the company updates of Lufthansa AG, for instance. (more…)

At center stage of today’s release is the launch of a new OpenSocial app. The Management Model App released today is the first OpenSocial application on XING from a Dutch company. This makes a total of 19 applications from 8 countries running on XING. Read the guest blog posting by the founder and director of ProvenModels to learn more about how to get the most out of the Management Model App in your everyday work.

As we do every Wednesday, we made a few adjustments to the platform this week. These include a number of nearly invisible, hard-to-detect performance tweaks. Two visible changes this week apply to the XING References feature. Up until now, if you wanted to change or delete a reference you gave someone else, you had to click around quite a bit to do so (First go to your profile -> References -> My Contacts‘ References -> Contacts I have acted as a reference for). We’ve now shortened this path considerably: just go to the person’s References page, and you can edit or delete a reference directly there. (more…)

Editor’s note: This article by ProvenModels-founder and Director Willem Moolenburgh is part of a series following the launch of the XING Partner Ecosystem in which the developers of the OpenSocial apps have the opportunity of presenting their applications.

ProvenModels is happy to announce the launch of the My Management Models application on XING’s platform. Business professionals are now able to access our concise management model summaries while leveraging the social benefits of XING’s network. The application also enables users to locate, connect and engage with other members who may not be easily found through the regular search criteria.

What is My Management Models?

The My Management Models application provides access to management theories and principles from leading business thinkers, such as Peter Drucker (“Management by Objectives”), Igor Ansoff (“Product Market Matrix”) or Michael Porter (“Five Forces”). Each management model is accompanied by adjustable and practical PowerPoint slides. Users personalise their XING profiles by selecting interesting management models and can easily connect to other XING members who have selected the same model. (more…)

Find out more about XING.

By enabling members to customize their Company Profiles we are responding to widespread requests for users to be able to share more information about their company and its products and services– above and beyond the short description, the contact details and company updates posted. The new “About this company” tab – designed precisely for this purpose – is available with both the Standard and Plus package.

There are 6,000 characters at users’ disposal under this tab. This is equivalent to around two well-filled A4 pages, giving you plenty of space to go into some detail about what it is your company does. You don’t have to use all of these characters of course – you may choose to simply include a brief rundown highlighting particular aspects of your business, and then to include a link, e.g. to your website, where readers can then find more detailed information. (more…)

With Company Profiles it is now possible to enter a description text detailing you company – to find out more take a look at the blog entry “Tell members more about your company“. And that’s not all: We have also improved the logo upload for Company Profiles meaning that images are no longer cropped if you happen to have uploaded them in the wrong format. On a similar note, we have also optimized all PNG graphics on our platform at the same time so that they should all load faster for you from now on. (more…)

Welcome to the very first release update of the new year. As usual every Wednesday, this is where we let you know about all the latest additions and amendments to our platform. And today is no different, with several obvious changes designed to optimize your networking success, as well as a few other less obvious developments that are just as beneficial.

Writing XING messages just got even quicker

As a Premium Member you will now be able to send messages directly from any page on the platform where members are shown in a list, without having to visit the person’s profile or leave the list itself. (more…)

Jason Goldberg

As the year 2009 concludes, Jason Goldberg, currently Chief Product Officer at XING and founder of Jobster and socialmedian, will set sail for New York again. Amidst the Christmas and pre-moving buzz, we took the opportunity to sit down with him and talk about an eventful year, about coming to Germany, and the future of the web.

Jason – there are rumors in the company that you read a book on how to deal with Germans before moving over here. Is that true?

(laughs) Indeed: When we were negotiating XING’s purchase of socialmedian in 2008, I noticed the communication was quite different. Walking through the law firm’s office, I spotted a book on How to negotiate with Germans. One of the first lessons: they don’t respond very well to emotions – and that, of course, I read right after I had given a rather emotional statement.  Ooops! (more…)

Good news for everyone who wants to expand their network and add new XING members: Now you can get a free Premium month for every seven successful invitations. Up till now it was 10. Naturally, all invitations you’ve collected will stay stored in the system and continue to count towards free months.

Plus, we’ve made other changes all throughout the platform. (more…)

There’s a lot going on at Gaensemarkt this time of year, from the Christmas market on the square up to XING Engineering on the sixth floor of number 26. Once again, we’ve launched improvements and new features on the platform this week that affect nearly all areas of XING.

Import Events as a feed

We’ve offered the ability to export individual events for some time. Starting today, it’s also possible to import your own Events from XING to your MS Outlook or Google calendar. Just select the “Sync my Events” tab on the Events page. Here’s a tip: Don’t share the feed URL with other people – after all, they’re your private events. (more…)

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. (more…)