We recently covered socialmedian, which late last year was acquired by European business social network XING, when they introduced a nifty application on the Facebook platform that allowed its users to share personalized news from across the web with their social graph.
At the time, I thought it was a bit of a strange move to support Facebook before powering the platform of its new owner, but former socialmedian CEO Jason Goldberg – who now has the position of Chief Product Officer at the public company – told me to expect an integration with XING to follow suite soon enough.
As of today, XING users can install the first two applications on its OpenSocial-driven platform: one (Xing News) takes the entire concept of socialmedian – personalized news filtering and sharing – and transforms it into a straightforward XING feature, the other one (Ask Xing) is a tool users can install to easily ask questions to the XING community and get responses without ever needing to leave the service.
These are arguably rather mundane applications, but the bigger news is that the social network now also features its very own application platform and is about to open it up to third-parties as well. In the near future, 10 current partners will get to distribute their own OpenSocial applications on the platform, and Goldberg tells me ultimately the plan is to open up more and finetune the approval process for new apps.
For reference: XING boasts 7+ million members, mostly in Germany and neighbor countries, of which over half a million actually pay a monthly subscription fee to access some of the premium features.
I just wonder if a professional network needs such a feature!? why don’t they just do one thing, and do it good?
the same reasons google have have many other website….. which some of them got closed…
iTunes fail
http://www.epic.../load/8-1-0-296
Yeah, I don’t get the whole LinkedIn meets Digg idea either.
Jason if you are reading this I would rather say this here than on twitter.
Big Mistake going to XING. Big Mistake integrating SM into Xing.
I read every Socailmedian email updates every day.
Now you had to screw it up..not a XING user.
Socialmedian I supported since its statup at TC50. It was all I needed along with Twitter.
Now I’m stuck with F**** Friendfeed.
Bleah!
earlwallace
That’s nothing. Cory Bergman finally jumped the shark at Lost Remote and turned it into a PERSONAL BLOG.
PS This means you guys lost a KILLER LINK.
Sorry about your suicide, Cory.
it if looks like shit, smells like shit, tastes like shit
Just add antioxidants and claim it’s fat free. You’ll solve your inventory hassles.
I remember when Jason Goldberg was spamming users to pump up this site before selling to Xing. Was very frustrating and a flash-in-the-pan kind of startup (no matter Goldberg’s previous accomplishments)
I’ve always struggled to see the point of Socialmedian. I get an e-mail which tells me of some interesting articles I might have missed, by I click stratight through to go to the original source and if I comment I do it there. I think I can see what SM is doing, but I don’t know what they get out of me being on the site for as long as it takes to click off again. More to the point, I don’t understand what XING gets from that.
I do my article sharing on Twitter.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz