OpenSocial app assault
Some XING apps will be be familiar to LinkedIn users: they will both have SlideShare and online workspaces from Huddle. But XING has has sourced heavily from European sources with apps from Doodle, Dopplr, Deutsche Welle, MindMeister, spreed, travelload, Tungle, sueddeutsche.de, Wallstreet:Online, WELT ONLINE and ZCOPE. The applications spread from news and project management through to travel planning and data sharing. They can be installed on your XING account here.
Stefan Gross-Selbeck, CEO of XING, says the over-riding idea is to concentrate on making Xing a hard core business tool. So it makes sense then that this first wave of apps – a second wave is already being planned I gather – is aimed at remote collaboration. That’s pretty similar to LinkedIn’s approach.
Back in October last year LinkedIn launched its OpenSocial-based platform
called InApps. But there users are restricted to including a maximum of 15 applications on their main profile pages – at XING they won’t have much restrictions, as it is instead going to give users their head in what apps they load onto their page. These will compliment the apps already developed by XING itself, including the XING News and Ask XING apps launched in May and the TwitterBuzz app launched in June.
Finally, it has to be said that although XING has clearly worked hard at integrating these apps, it can’t hide its German roots (users in the US won’t be making much use of the German news service apps for instance) so the question remains about whether XING can in the end break out to a more international scene, especially given its recent withdrawal from China.
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