Xing’s mistake was in clinging too long to the notion of a class-conscious club, both in name (BC Open Club) and in its old-school revenue model that delivered insufficient value for non-paid users. However, if you have a niche requirement to reach elites within German-speaking countries, Xing could be helpful.

While there’s always room for a “private club” which charges outrageous fees in order to deter the average person and thus create some exclusivity for the wealthy who prefer to avoid the great unwashed masses, I think most professional people will eventually find it somewhat silly to pay money for what is essentially a glorified Yahoo profile or rough equivalent.

Currently, these networks are artificial gates and nothing more. I think most people join out of some ignorance and by referral. It should work out that, as more people find other costless networks (including interest groups, charities, religious, etc) they will decreasingly opt to buy their way into clubs, except -I suppose- in matters of status.

It might take a time to shake out, but I’m confident that will be the eventual direction for the vast majority of folks in the long term.

really enjoyed reading this blog and can probably agree with most of your statements. Still I believe that the Business Networking market is LinkedIn’s to loose; if they are adapting to some of XING’s strengths (see my blog entry http://janmeise.blogspot.com/2006/12/linkedin-versus-xingopenbc.html) then we might see LinkedIn as the winner…

My little weekend post I believed to me neat but did without having any special intentions seems to have started having a life of it’s own :).

I did not realize that Xing just launched when I posted it (which coincidentally timed it well). I just happened to go that day to Xing because of a notification about a connection request and noticed that I was redirected to Xing.com and that OpenBC.com is no more.

I blogged about the name change in September at my blog at ReveNews and thought that it would be nice to follow up on that. I spent an hour or so looking over new interface and collected some links with pricing and service details and wrote what I thought about the two services personally plus did some speculating about the future without going over statistics or corporate backgrounds first.

I am not a professional reviewer, just a regular user who uses services like LinkedIn and Xing for my daily business.

But I feel now that I should make a follow up post after all the feedback, comments and obvious interest in this story.

I collected already a lot more data and plan to post something next week or so.
Cheers,
Carsten

I am personally glad that you enjoy our services and hope that you also enjoy the future improvements we are making. As our goal is to provide value to all our members it is great to see such feedback.

Warm regards,
Bill Liao

The new and sanitized version on their Web site omits that number. Changing press releases after the fact is in my book not a good indication that things are going well . . .

While Konstantin’s observations correct about paid vs free, he is also biasing the argument towards LinkedIn by using half-truths. No suprise there as it’s coming from LinkedIN exec :) And besides Xing went profitable in the 3rd month while LinkedIN took 3 years :)

I wrote quite a bit on the redesign from openBC to Xing.com at this blog entry; http://sachistudio.com/blog/2006/11/22/deconstructing-the-redesign-of-openbc-to-xingcom/
and in the last paragraph, I talk about the shakeout b/w all 4 major SNS- Ecademy, LinkedIN, openBC, and Ryze. Apparently, some of the employees at Xing were impressed with the critique that they passed it on and took note of some of my suggestions about the usability and accessibility part.

While I like your entry and analysis, I believe the major flaw here is to compare LinkedIN [a passive social networking model] to Xing [an open SNS, much like Ryze and Ecademy].

Both LinkedIN and Xing will do just fine. To make the assertion that there can only be one left standing in the space of business focused SNS is not quite kosher. If anything, there is room for more.

Having said that, I look forward to the war to come. As I said on my forum, some of us who are users of Xing and LinkedIN look foward to the battle ahead :)

Look forward to your follow up.