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Xing On Its Way To Become An Identity Hub

This weekend Xing will roll out a new, simpler member profile design.

Besides various usability tweaks and higher granularity to specify the career, education, details on the companies and positions, etc. maybe the most interesting aspect is the possibility to easily add links to their pages or profiles at various other services, if a member wants to share this information.

screenshot xing

source: openBLOG

From the press release:

The new design of the profile makes the XING platform into an integrated Web hub, providing a docking point and interface to other online activities of XING members. Users can now list other profiles they may have at other Web 2.0 providers, and provide direct links to these profiles. These include for instance: Amazon, eBay, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Mister Wong, Last.fm, Dopplr, Photobucket and Digg.

Although they use high flying words – Xing can now be used to promote the many faces of virtual identity a Xing member might have, Let XING become your primary point of departure for your multifaced virtual identity, … – for the time being this only emulates a list of links. But it opens at least two spaces:

A space of trust. Words are cheap and users can write anything they want into their Xing profiles. And while there is no reason to not trust another member, it also would be naive to automatically just believe every self-promotional effort. If you can browse another members stream at other services you will be able to draw a better picture of someone’s persona.

Since the user data at other services are entered in a structured way (i.e. name of service plus username) Xing also will be able to easily make good use of this information. They could aggregate some sort of lifestream of each user, they could parse the social graph of each user at the various services and compute all kinds of interesting things, they could provide some sort of mini feed of the activities of the network of a member at all those services, etc.

Smart move.

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)

☍ 27.09.2007 # xing identity