A Review of Xing
Site: Xing
Members: 6.5 Million
Features: Xing offers business social networking based out of Europe. Using groups, profiles, and an active marketplace people can connect to share goods and services. You can use Xing as a contact management software where you can note and tag information about the contact.
There are thousands of groups that you can join with some with a membership of 20,000 and higher. Also users can stay up to date on events that range from online broadcasts to conferences.
Review: The automatic comparison one will make with Xing is LinkedIn. I like the look and navigation of LinkedIn much better. I really can’t get passed comparing the two sites. LinkedIn to me just is a better user experience overall. I have already been invited more times blindly than I have on LinkedIn, personally that isn’t very appealing to me.
Also I feel like Xing sends way too much e-mail over the week. If you join Xing make sure you take the time to change the amount of notification that come in.
Check out my semi complete list of niche social networks
LinkedIn and Xing have currently some distinct features. LinkedIn provides personal references. Xing has worldwide reach (16 instead of 4 languages).
Groups leverage the event features (good for real and virtual events) – from eg The Greater IBM Connections (13000 members) to local business groups with monthly local (real) events.
I get occassional invitations to join groups or events (about one per month) as well as job offers. In the last five years I had one or two job offers where the head hunter also invited to directly link up. Beside of that I never received unsolicited link invitations.
Another distinction is the jurisdication. Xing is based in Germany and therefore must comply to the German data protection laws which are much stricter than eg United States. People concerned about sharing their private data might take this into consideration too.