What I want Xing to be

March 18, 2008 Comments

I am starting to figure out that the only social network I am really using often is Xing. This is for one simple reasons: It is becoming my address book. This is really what Xing should be focussing on in my mind. Marketplace and all is nice, but there is an amazing value to be created from simply making sure that it becomes my address book. Once Xing becomes my address book there is actually no synchronization problem anymore. My data store is Xing. I don’t want to Sync. I want Xing to be my address book. If there is somebody not in Xing I want to be able to add that person to my Pool of contacts and if it through social apis they will be able to get more information about them from the web. I want full access on the go, an app for the iPhone, S60 phones, Mac Addressbook Plugin, a great mobile html version, … . We are moving to an always on world and I one thing that is still not online for me is my address book. eMails are online through GMail but the address book is only synchronized between several devices.

So there you go, needed to get that off my chest. Please enhance Xing to be my address book. Always there, with everybody I have in my rolodex, in Xing or not.

Enough of the rambling. These 2 minutes writing helped get that of my chest

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Tao 6 months ago 1 point
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Still feel the best way of doing this would be to write an LDAP based front-end to the information contained in Xing. LDAP is supported across a large range of software (incl. Apple's addressbook) and on most devices, especially those that also support exchange (exchange uses it too, although they call it something else).

One of the original web-development demos for the iPhone actually showed a web-app doing LDAP, that looked 100% like the internal address book. Funny coincidence...

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Jamie Wilkinson 6 months ago 1 point
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Oli, where do you hang out on Xing?

@tao: agree about using LDAP as an interface in theory, but ideally we'd have a nicer, more standardized protocol than LDAP -- it continues to be propagated only because its already propagated, and not because it is good :( (disclaimer: I use LDAP all the time)

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http://tramchase.com

Jamie Wilkinson 6 months ago 1 point
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I also totally just realized I was mixing up Xing and Ning. Names 2.0 ahhh!!!

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http://tramchase.com

Oliver 6 months ago 1 point
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I think I need to talk to lars to see if their API is still available ... ldap sounds good, even though I have to admit that I still do not get it. And I hate using stuff I don't intuitively understand :)

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http://thylmann.net/