Today’s update includes a number of new features for our platform, many of which are based on ideas you submitted to us via our UserVoice feedback tool. A lot of today’s changes involve the Company Profiles and help you to boost your company’s presence and image on XING even further.

From now on you can assign direct company contacts so that people who visit your Company Profile know who they can contact if they want to apply for a job or if they are journalists and have some questions about the company. Companies with a ‘Standard’ Company Profile can assign four contacts while companies with a ‘Plus’ Company Profile can state ten. The beta version of the XING company quiz for all companies with at least ten employees will also be going live today. How well do you know your own colleagues? Take the test and answer up to ten questions to find out. Maybe you’ll even make it into the high score list. (more…)

The latest version of our BlackBerry app was released along with a number of improvements for the OAuth interface, which you need to invite your email contacts, for example. And that’s not all – today we’ve also provided a number of minor optimizations including the much-improved ‘Print profile’ function.

Being able to print out your profile and other XING member profiles, which are inserted into our style sheets to visually adjust the layout, is of course nothing new. But now we have tweaked the corresponding CSS data and enhanced it even further so that a profile printout can also be used as a large professional business card complete with résumé.

We have also added a ‘Print profile’ button which is located on the right-hand side under ‘Options’. Of course you can only print out contact information for people whose profiles are visible to you, and vice versa.

In July 2009 we launched our BlackBerry application. Since then we have been monitoring which functions have proven most popular and evaluated all of the great feedback we received from users. As a result of this, we have now finished developing version 1.5, which adds to or improves various aspects of the app. All of the previous features such as searching within your own contacts, finding people on XING, synchronization with the BlackBerry address book, and mobile status messaging are of course still available.

Save Time, Money and Traffic

Optimized data management is one of the new developments and is now far more efficient with less data being automatically loaded. This in turn helps to reduce the level of traffic generated and not only leads to increased execution speeds, but can also help to put off the speed reduction that a number of providers enforce when users exceed a certain monthly data volume. This of course helps to save money when roaming. (more…)

This week’s new developments include a mini facelift of our OpenSocial app Ask XING where you can now see all of the frequently used actions (Answer question/Forward question/Follow question) at a glance without having to move the cursor to the question. Other interaction options such as ‘Report as inappropriate’ can be found by clicking on the ‘More’ button on the right.

As part of our ‘De-De-Anonymizing’ drive we have now made changes to the Groups link structure. By dynamically adding a random number, the address in the RSS feed of ‘What’s new in your network’ changed more often and previously read messages about users who joined a group appeared as ‘new’ messages. These problems have now been rectified. (more…)

You’ve probably experienced something similar in the past while using the XING platform – certain areas you were well acquainted with suddenly looked completely different. Perhaps an input field had moved, a button name had changed, or the site had been redesigned? Perhaps tomorrow things will be back to how they were in the past. What’s going on? Some areas may even look completely different on a colleague’s screen to yours. What’s that all about? Is it some kind of half-baked design or poorly designed bananaware intended to come of age when with the customer? No, you’re not even close.

So what exactly is it then?

As is customary within our industry, we perform so-called A/B tests on various parts of our platform, meaning that one group of XING users (A) sees a certain interface or function while a control group (B) is presented with a variant offering the same functionality but with different visuals. There is no opt-in or opt-out – the system assigns users to the groups, everything else would lead to inconsistent test results. (more…)

The annual World Economic Forum meeting took place a while back, but we’re still receiving messages from users irritated by what they heard there on the topic of social networking and privacy. ‘Old People’s Issues’ was the term used by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman when talking about people’s concerns involving privacy within social networks. German users appear to be particularly sensitive to the subject, and Jeff Jarvis wrote about the ‘German privacy paradox’ in his blog after noticing that the Germans worry a lot about various privacy aspects when online, but are all too ready to strip off all their clothes and head for the sauna. (more…)

On Wednesday, February 10, 2010, a number of interesting new changes went live on XING. Available now, users of Company Profiles with a PLUS membership can now have tweets appear directly in their Company updates. If you would like to add this feature, just go to your Company Profile, select the ‘Company updates’ tab and then add the Twitter account name whose content you want to appear there. (more…)

When surfing the net beyond the realms of social networks or forums, I, and probably most of you too, assume that our presence is anonymous. So last Monday I was really surprised when I visited the de-anonymizing site created by researchers Thorsten Holz and Gilbert Wondracek which quickly ‘exposed’ me within a short space of time by entering a bare minimum of information. This scenario was well below my personal expectations in terms of anonymity, but in my function as VP Operations at XING AG, it got me really excited as the majority of the de-anonymizing process was based on information from our Group sites.

XING’s data protection maxim is ‘Our customers trust XING and its users’ and a key part of that trust is our customers’ right to decide for themselves how they want to appear in public and which data they want to post online. As a result of these considerations and our experience in security, we immediately initiated a number of measures to prevent this kind of classic history stealing and make it impossible for online users to be exposed. The technique deployed was of a purely academic and experimental nature specific to the intended purpose. As far as we are aware, this experiment posed no threat to XING users and their data whatsoever. Despite this, we decided to react immediately before the process became established beyond its current experimental context.

De-Anonymizing (more…)

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…)