This is the new XING gadget on iGoogle..

We’ve already received masses of positive feedback in response to the XING App on Allyve.com and the XING Desktop Gadget for Windows Vista. iGoogle allows you to create your personalized Google page. The new XING Gadget lets you see what’s going on in your network at any given time – right from your iGoogle start page.

The XING Gadget keeps you up-to-the-minute, showing you at a glance who last visited your profile, how many new contact requests you have and how many unread messages are waiting for you. An integrated XING search means you can search directly for people or companies on XING from the comfort of your customized start page.

The gadget is currently available in German, English, Spanish, Turkish and Italian. The default language for all other users is English. As always, data protection is our top priority. We’ve applied the very latest Oauth Standards with this feature, meaning your personal data remains secure.

Install the XING Gadget for iGoogle now.

Have fun!

Deniz Seebacher, XING Ambassador No. 200

New XING Ambassadors are continually joining the ranks and new regional groups are continually being created around the world. In June we welcomed the 200^th Ambassador, Deniz Seebacher, in Guatemala.  She tells us how she ended up becoming an Ambassador:

“I have been a XING member since 2005, but I really started using the business network intensively when I moved to Guatemala for personal reasons in 2009. I was looking for new contacts in a country where I hardly knew anyone. My search for German-speaking members in Guatemala City didn’t return many hits, but I wrote to a few of them. That’s how, in addition to meeting two people who have become very good friends of mine, I got to know Christoph and his company Officient, which led to my first local project. Since Christoph and I value XING as a networking platform and wanted to use it more intensively, we started looking for contacts on the local market. At the time, XING was looking for Ambassadors in Central America. So we decided to become Ambassadors and start up the XING Guatemala group.

XING is not yet very well known in Guatemala, but networking is a part of the local culture. That’s why we made it our goal to get the local networking structures in Guatemala online, which would also make it possible to network internationally. The motto of the first networking event here was “Let’s put Guatemala on the map of international networking” - a quote from the first group posting by Sergio Aragon, XING AG.

Of the approximately 50 participants who were there, only a few had come directly as a result of the XING invitation. A lot of them were there because they had heard about it from someone they knew. But by the end of the evening, I was out of business cards and everyone there knew what XING was. Word of mouth has brought a lot of new members to the group.

The first official XING event in Guatemala.

Of course, being a XING Ambassador takes a bit of time, but every minute is worth it. Within just two months I had established many new connections here in Guatemala, as well as a few international contacts with other Ambassadors.
Christoph and I are delighted to be able to represent XING in Guatemala as Ambassadors and we congratulate the rest of the 200 Ambassadors around the world.

I also always enjoy hearing about new Ambassadors and their stories. So here’s to the next 200 profile pictures with orange triangles!

Why we chose Ferret initally

Ferret was introduced when we needed a search service for XING Jobs, which was the first part of our application using the Ruby on Rails framework. At that time, Ferret was just right. As it is written in super fast C code, it became  first choice when it comes to performance. But it is also partly written in Ruby, which allowed us to write the analyzer, query parser and tokenizer in our favorite language (oh the joy!). Ferret has served us very well until now.

But things have changed. Over the years, we have extended the Ferret-search to XING Events and Company Profiles, increasing our initial search volume by magnitudes. Furthermore, the search queries created by our application became far more complex, for example using several languages in just one indexed field. This lead to scaling problems, and our experiences using a DRb-based (think RMI for Ruby) remote interface for the search service turned out to be brittle and crash prone under certain circumstances, especially when multiple clients caused high load on the search servers. Another problem we faced was that, as a new developer it takes quite some time to become acquainted with Ferret and our implementations around it.

So on one of those occasions where we had to go into debugging mode deep within the DRb world, we really wished to have a simpler remote interface, maybe something like HTTP that could easily be scaled by standard means (think load balancers). On another occasion we encountered some serious memory leaks that had gone unnoticed under moderate load with simple queries. They had to be fixed by ourselves because the few official maintainers were busy with other projects or generally unavailable when we tried to reach them. Patches in their bug tracker were left untouched for months, and the official website is frequently unavailable.

We were left with a couple of choices: We could basically maintain ferret ourselves, find someone who would do it for us or find an alternative and switch. As you can imagine this ensured a lot of heated discussions within our engineering department, since in the end ferret was “kind of working”. As the frequency of problems increased, we chose to investigate other possibilities and technologies.

Ferret-ing out alternatives

One of the main lessons we learned while staying with ferret, and we learned it the hard way, was that a good search engine needs a good community of users and developers contributing. There was no such thing for Ferret. Of all the named arguments, this is the most important one. In general we think that when using an open source product, you better choose one that has a lively community around it. This guarantees that errors that were fixed by third parties will flow back into the main product, that you find experts to consult you around the world and that you can exchange knowledge on forums, wikis and conferences. So we started looking for a search service that:

1. Was easy to scale
2. Had a “developer-friendly” interface we could hook into
3. Was actively developed and supported

So we evaluated SOLR, which is based on the Lucene information retrieval library, just like Ferret. This means the syntax for our analyzers, query parsers and tokenizers do not differ so much from what we are used to. But unlike Ferret, SOLR is a real industry standard. There are lots of maintainers, bug reporters, wiki authors, consulting companies and conference panels, so in short: There is a profound ecosystem surrounding the SOLR search engine.

We carefully watched how long it takes until a SOLR maintainer reacts to an issue created in their JIRA bugtracker, and these guys are really fast and willing to solve all incoming bugs. They include patches written by third parties in the official sources, and release new versions of their software regularly. Furthermore, as SOLR is an industry standard, we already had developers in our team that have worked with it before. And, last but not least, SOLR works over a standard HTTP interface. On the one hand, this liberates us from awkward DRb code, on the other hand this allows painless scaling with standard HTTP load balancers. Furthermore, the acts_as_solr Rails plugin makes it feel like any other Ruby library.

While Ferret works with Ruby only, SOLR can be used with a plethora of programming languages. So it is no wonder that our fellow perl programmers have already made the switch to SOLR about a year ago. Employing only one search engine for all parts of our application will reduce the maintenance effort in the future. The shorter training period will ensure that all of our developers (even the ones trying to avoid DRb) will be familiar with our search technology. And, beyond that, SOLR offers far more features than Ferret, like faceted search, allowing us to implement a more powerful and user friendly search, for example through freely filtering and ordering search results by all available dimensions.

The upcoming migration

The introduction of SOLR follows a very smooth migration path. First, we cleaned up our own search interface for the Rails application, which is search engine agnostic now. Then we configured SOLR to mimic the behavior of our proven and tested Ferret search engine, to have a drop in replacement. Next, we will pick a beta group out of our 7 million members. This is what happens next, so you might be among them.

Search queries of this beta group will be run by SOLR instead of Ferret to compare the quality of the results. As soon as we are sure everything works as expected, we will extend the beta group to all users gradually. At this point in time, we are ready to develop new and awesome search features with SOLR technology under the hood.

I know that a lot of you out there use a program to manage all your events and contacts. PC or web-based software such as MS Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage, Lotus Notes or Thunderbird Lightning can greatly simplify managing all your events. Many of these programs can be synced with several computers and mobile devices, meaning you’ll never miss an appointment, wherever you are.

Wouldn’t it be great if your XING Events were also integrated into this framework, if you could access them when you’re not online or on XING, or print out a daily schedule? That’s precisely why we offer an export function for XING Events. I’ll show you how to do it using MS Outlook 2007, but the principle is the same for almost all programs.

We’ll choose the Outlook export format, though in most cases, appointment software supports both formats.

Your browser will ask you what to do with the file you’re downloading - I’d recommend you open it directly. If you have more than one event planning programs on your computer, select the one you use the most. If you use Google Calendar or another web-based program, you should save the file and import it later.

In our case, Outlook will start when needed, and import the event immediately. The description, the location and the time is added automatically. You can make changes and add details if you want, such as assigning a category or a priority. After you click on “Save and close”, the event will be saved in your digital calendar, and synced to your other computers or mobile devices, as the case may be.

Please keep in mind: If you decide not to attend the event and wish to tell the organizer, it’s not enough to delete the event in your calendar - Outlook doesn’t sync back to XING and share this information. You’ll have to do so directly on the XING website. Similarly, if you want to recommend an event to your friends, make sure to use the “Invite other guests” button on XING. Otherwise, the organizer won’t know about it.

Kind regards,

Silke Schippmann.

It’s free-of-charge and enables smartphone users (many of whom are business professionals) to access their personal with much more ease when on the road. Besides access to all contact data and “News from your network”, the application lets you read and respond to all your XING messages as well.

One highlight that I am particularly proud of is its capability to synchronize individual contact data from your personal network on XING with your own address contacts on your BlackBerry.

Free download for BlackBerry smartphones at www.xing.com

In addition to English, the XING app supports German, Spanish, Turkish and Italian. The app can be downloaded for free directly to the user’s BlackBerry smartphone by simply by visiting the XING mobile website. Simply type in www.xing.com. The appropriate version for a specific BlackBerry smartphone model is automatically detected. The XING app requires an Internet-enabled BlackBerry smartphone running OS Version 4.2 or later with at least 64 MB internal memory and 170 KB of available memory.

An inviting prospect: Improvements to Events

For starters, the weekday is now also displayed throughout the feature, from invitations to listings, making it much easier to schedule your personal calendar. A “co-organizer” can also be added to group events too now - someone who doesn’t necessarily have to be (co-)Moderator of the group. This can be extremely useful, especially for instance if you want to invite a guest speaker for your group conference and wish to give them the opportunity to invite their own contacts.

The town/city (i.e. business address) will be listed alongside the name and company from now on in the list for selecting possible guests. And there’s one more convenient new update: Members can now filter by town/city and post code as well - something which up until now has only been possible using keywords.

Furthermore, from this week onwards you can now search specifically using the Advanced Search for companies that currently have vacant positions listed under XING Jobs. And there are now also two brand new categories for job listings: Public Heath and Transport.

Two months ago we launched a feature allowing XING members to twitter about events they’re organizing or attending directly from our platform. Not surprisingly, the feature got a great deal of resonance, with thousands using it every month. This overwhelming response has encouraged us to expand Twitter interfaces on XING. Now….drum roll, please! With the launch of our third OpenSocial application, ‘Twitter Buzz’, we’re doing exactly that.

You can use the new application to stay on top with what’s being said about the topics that are important to you. You can follow what people are twittering about your company, your industry, or about any other topic that interests you. The application also allows you to choose whether you want to receive updates in other languages, or just in certain languages of your choice.

So give it a try, it’s free, of course: Go to Twitter Buzz.

Caption: Twitter Buzz is available on your XING home page and in a separate independent window (see picture above).

Members who organize events will be particularly pleased to hear that we have optimized the messaging feature for events. It is now much easier to select exactly which people attending you wish to send your messages to. Furthermore, any rescheduling of the event (change of place or time) does not require a second answer from everybody who has already replied. Of course the invitees are notified about the rescheduling.

It is now much easier to select recipients when sending event updates.

And there’s more: Today’s update also sees some repair work of various link inconsistencies in the Company Profiles. And the invitation algorithm has also been improved, meaning it can now differentiate better between alphabetically identical tags written in capitals and small letters. Most of the window cleaning we’ve been doing is at the rear view of our platform though, laying down the basic infrastructure for some brand new features over the coming weeks.

News in my network: See what your colleagues and friends are doing.

We launched the first version of our iPhone client at the end of 2008, designed to give you mobile access to the most essential XING features (status updates, messages, and contacts). And we were pretty overwhelmed with the response. More than 1,500 reviews in the App Store go to show just how important mobile networking is to our users. We gathered all your feedback - from our blog, from Twitter and from the store reviews - and got to work turning the best ideas and suggestions into reality. Today we’re pleased to announce the latest version of the app, which is available for download right now in the App Store. In case you were wondering, the new version is of course still completely free.

Brand new: Visitors to your profile, XING invitations and member search

The new version is packed full of improvements and new additions: “What’s new in your network” has more features for Premium Members; you can search in your Contacts by name and company (which saves your scrolling finger a lot of effort!).

Furthermore, all contact details that your contacts have shared with you is now automatically updated in real time. You can now check out the “Visitors to your profile”, search for members and add and confirm contacts. So the new iPhone app really does come with the whole range of core XING networking features on-the-go.

We also optimized the login and logout interfaces - again, in response to your feedback.

We’re confident that this update represents a giant leap towards making XING’s mobile capabilities more user friendly. But remember - we’re always looking to enhance our products, and welcome any suggestions for improvements you have. If you have feedback you can post a comment right here, for instance!

At first it seems like group memberships are pretty clearly divided up into business-interest and private-interest groups - but this isn’t quite the case. This is where a key networking idea behind XING comes into play: Combining business and pleasure!

Whatever group you happen to be in - whether it’s a serious and specialist gathering of experts or a fan group with a broad mix of people all crazy about the same thing - you begin interacting with other members straight away. What’s more: these particularly members are like-minded, in at least one respect anyway.

What starts out as an innocent chat in a basketball forum, could turn out to be a new major new client contract for your business. Who knows?! Any two people meeting and getting to know one another at a group event will be far more likely to consider working together than, say, two people exchanging brief and relatively impersonal emails.

Having said this, there are literally thousands of XING groups dedicated to serious expert discussion, that can prove to be extremely useful resources. Be sure to take a look at the category “topics” for instance,  and I promise you will come across some groups that catch your eye.

While networking in a professional context is theoretically possible in all 26,000 groups on XING, your success rate is likely to be greater in some regional or socially-focused groups.

OK, so once you’ve identified some groups that take your fancy and you’ve joined them, how should you go about getting started as a group member? What should you bear in mind?

You can use Phrase Express to add your own signature under all your posts, for instance. You should keep this self-promotion within limits though, so be sparing with the number of words you use here! Don’t confuse groups with a place just to blow your own trumpet. Other members will quickly tell whether you’re only out to sell something, or if you are serious and genuine about engaging with other people in relation to the topic of the group.

Surviving in the group jungle …

It goes without saying that mutual respect and politeness are expected in group forums. You should avoid irony and sarcasm, as well as smileys - simply because these can often be misinterpreted and lead to misunderstandings without the benefits of subtle gestures.

You should always be aware too that there are many silent readers who’ll all be forming an opinion about you based on what you post! You can also edit all your entries up three days after posting them. After this point, only moderators are able to make changes.

The “About this group” page includes details about a group’s settings, such as whether group articles are visible to group members, XING members or indeed anyone. Please note though: Your own privacy settings will always override any group settings.

You can also choose whether or not you wish to receive newsletters and event invitations from the group on the start page. Replying to invitations and actually turning up to events makes moderators’ lives much easier. You can change your participation at any time.

You can subscribe to certain threads or an entire forum, which means you’ll receive email notifications of new posts. You can also set up RSS feeds if the moderator has selected the appropriate settings (”visible to all members”) for the group. You can also activate the info boxes “New articles in my groups” or “New articles in all groups”, and drag and drag these feeds to wherever you like on your start page.

Ideally, you’ll generate both valuable new contacts within groups and a great deal of new insights and knowledge through interaction.  Make the most of the wisdom of the crowd!

People are always pleased to receive positive feedback on their posts. So be sure publish honest, positive comments that are a good public reflection on you as well.

Don’t be shy about approaching moderators either if you have any new ideas or want to get involved more. Group-relevant content is always very welcome and may well get posted on the start page or find its way into newsletters. Any events you’re thinking of organizing could well be announced and publicized via a particular group too.

Time that’s worth investing

I’d like to close by touching on a question I’m often asked: What sort of time level do I need to spend in groups to make membership worthwhile? Well, clearly, someone who relies on client acquisition or works in a particular industry will potentially have more to gain and may therefore be willing to invest more of their time.

On the other hand, work and pleasure go hand in hand in many more groups than you perhaps might think. For any members without much time on their hands I would suggest:

• Searching for some really relevant groups
• Subscribing to the most important forums (or all forums in smaller groups)
• Introducing yourself once you have joined and
• Stopping by now and again whenever you have a moment

On this note: I hope you gain much business and pleasure from the groups you decide to join!

Kind regards,

Silke Schippmann