Team socialmedian strikes again with our 3rd application on XING since XING acquired socialmedian in January 2009.
The newest application: Twitter Buzz.
In recent months, we've launched a number of features with a single goal: Making XING even more valuable for as many of our members as possible. We listened to member feedback, and put priority on releasing exactly those features which will add the most value to the professional lives of our users. The new app Twitter Buzz fits this concept exactly.
Use "Twitter Buzz" on XING to keep up on the latest tweets on your business, your city, or anything else that might interest you. This app gives you a real-time summary of news and views on Twitter for topics you select from within XING.
More features on the way to make Twitter Buzz more social. And more applications on the way too.
The newest application: Twitter Buzz.
In recent months, we've launched a number of features with a single goal: Making XING even more valuable for as many of our members as possible. We listened to member feedback, and put priority on releasing exactly those features which will add the most value to the professional lives of our users. The new app Twitter Buzz fits this concept exactly.
Use "Twitter Buzz" on XING to keep up on the latest tweets on your business, your city, or anything else that might interest you. This app gives you a real-time summary of news and views on Twitter for topics you select from within XING.
More features on the way to make Twitter Buzz more social. And more applications on the way too.
Last Friday I spoke at the SOMESSO conference in London about one of my favorite topics, Ship It! Ship It! refers the new product development paradigm in which users are the R&D department.
Here are the bullet points from my talk. A short podcast can also be found here.
The new reality:
Ship It!
And finally, I ended the talk with 5 reasons why....
NOW IS THE BEST TIME EVER TO START AN INTERNET COMPANY:
Here are the bullet points from my talk. A short podcast can also be found here.
The new reality:
- The world is a perpetual beta. Even we are perpetual beta, as evidenced by our ever-changing Facebook profiles and updates.
- Your addressable market is already using social networks. (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, XING)
- Your addressable market is adopting social media. (e.g. Twitter)
- User feedback is coming whether you like it or not. It will be public.
Ship It!
- As fast as possible
- With the minimum required functionality
- Embrace feedback and participate in the dialogue
- Commit yourself to rapid iteration
- Stop debating and analyzing and start shipping!
- Users know better
- Tweet your feature request is the new software model
- You are the new mayor of Twitterville (As product manager, think of yourself as mayor of a small city and your constituents have a tweet-dial way to provide you with instant input)
- Get Satisfaction for public customer service
- UserVoice for public feature suggestions and voting
And finally, I ended the talk with 5 reasons why....
NOW IS THE BEST TIME EVER TO START AN INTERNET COMPANY:
- It's cheaper than ever to get started and prove something. You don't need VC money, you just need a (good) idea and the ability to start shipping it and starting the feedback cycles with users. Think small. Think cheap. Think fast.
- Financial crisis + Economic crisis = Cash Constraints = Best Thing for Young Companies. Easy access to capital is a bad thing for startups. Being cash constrainted forces an important discipline and focus.
- Financial crisis + Economic crisis = Expectations Have Never Been Lower. No pressure to prove you will be a $1B company in 3 years. Just move the needle a little and it's a win.
- Phase I of the Internet was about getting everything online. Phase II is all about making sense of it. There are opportunities available in virtually every category you can imagine to help users make sense of what is already online. You can build very valuable and interesting businesses just around helping people make sense of what's already out there. In other words, you don't have to reinvent the wheel, you just need to make it spin faster, sharper, easier, etc.
- Distribution is everywhere! Distribution is everywhere! Distribution is everywhere! Historically the hardest thing for a startup to obtain yet one of the most important aspects to its success was distribution. But now, distribution is everywhere! Facebook provides distribuition via Facebook Apps. iPhone via iphone apps. LinkedIn. XING. Twitter. OpenSocial. Distribution is suddenly everywhere and it's setup in a way where the incentives are aligned; The platforms win when you win. Build a great app and it will rise to the top.
Last April we launched socialmedian.com on LouisGray.com.
Today, just a little more than 1 year later and 3 months after XING closed its acquisition of socialmedian, what comes around goes around, as we launched socialmedian on XING, again today on LouisGray.com.
I wrote a guest blog post on LouisGray.com today to mark this milestone.
Here is a snippet, with full link to the post.
Guest blog post from Jason Goldberg, Chief Product Officer at XING & founder of socialmedian
Hi everyone! Remember me? It has been quite a while since Jason Goldberg or socialmedian graced the blog-o-louisgray ... been waiting until I actually had something interesting to say.
Last year was quite a ride for me and for socialmedian. What started off in January of 2008 as an idea around social-graph-filtered-news rapidly became a website (launched on louisgray.com) that gained a die-hard following amongst the social media early-adopters. socialmedian was also one of the first companies to embrace distributed social media, integrating with Facebook, Twitter, and pioneering news-streaming as a form of life-streaming. Election 2008 propelled socialmedian, growing traffic to the site by 300% thanks to partnerships with the likes of the Washington Post and The Guardian. As it became clearer that socialmedian might have a future as a compliment to a larger network, Louisgray.com predicted an early exit for socialmedian. IMO the coolest part of the socialmedian story in 2008 was building the site with our users, conducting a public dialogue with users on what we should do next, and then each week launching new features based on direct user input. "Tweet what you think we should do next" is the new way to build software.
And then, almost as quickly as we came onto the scene, socialmedian was acquired by XING, Europe's professional networking leader.
The XING acquisition was announced in December 2008 and then closed in February 2009. Since then, I have been working fulltime at XING as the company's Chief Product Officer. And while I've surely kept up on Twitter, I haven't had much time for blogging and also haven't spent much time pimping socialmedian in the blogosphere as we've been very focused on getting some new projects going with XING. XING is really committed to being a leader in the next phase of the evolution of social media and it's really fun to be part of that effort. It's also really cool for me to be working for XING in Hamburg, Germany, and for a brash American social media dude to be impacting and influencing the growth and globalization of a European internet leader.
So, what does all this mean for socialmedian? What happens when a little website like socialmedian gets gobbled up by a XING? Does socialmedian have a future with XING?
One of the key projects I have been working on since I got to XING has been implementing the open-social platform on XING. This will enable XING and its partners to rapidly launch rich applications which enrich the XING user experience by tapping into the social-graph of relationships on XING.
I'm thrilled to announce that 3 months after XING closed the deal to acquire socialmedian, we just went live with two socialmedian-built applications on XING. The first beta testers now have access to the apps, which will distribute virally on XING. One, XING News, is a social news service in German, English, Spanish, and Turkish languages. It is basically socialmedian on XING, enabling XING members to get news filtered by their XING contacts, share stories of interest, discuss/comment, etc. The second is ASK Xing, which enables XING members to ask questions and get answers from the XING network. Both were built on the open-social framework which we are also launching Monday. We are going to start with these two socialmedian-team-built apps, and then in the following weeks launch several partner applications, of which we have many in testing now.
Follow this link to the full post and screenshots.
And here is my post on the same subject on XING's corporate blog.
Today, just a little more than 1 year later and 3 months after XING closed its acquisition of socialmedian, what comes around goes around, as we launched socialmedian on XING, again today on LouisGray.com.
I wrote a guest blog post on LouisGray.com today to mark this milestone.
Here is a snippet, with full link to the post.
Guest blog post from Jason Goldberg, Chief Product Officer at XING & founder of socialmedian
Hi everyone! Remember me? It has been quite a while since Jason Goldberg or socialmedian graced the blog-o-louisgray ... been waiting until I actually had something interesting to say.Last year was quite a ride for me and for socialmedian. What started off in January of 2008 as an idea around social-graph-filtered-news rapidly became a website (launched on louisgray.com) that gained a die-hard following amongst the social media early-adopters. socialmedian was also one of the first companies to embrace distributed social media, integrating with Facebook, Twitter, and pioneering news-streaming as a form of life-streaming. Election 2008 propelled socialmedian, growing traffic to the site by 300% thanks to partnerships with the likes of the Washington Post and The Guardian. As it became clearer that socialmedian might have a future as a compliment to a larger network, Louisgray.com predicted an early exit for socialmedian. IMO the coolest part of the socialmedian story in 2008 was building the site with our users, conducting a public dialogue with users on what we should do next, and then each week launching new features based on direct user input. "Tweet what you think we should do next" is the new way to build software.
And then, almost as quickly as we came onto the scene, socialmedian was acquired by XING, Europe's professional networking leader.
The XING acquisition was announced in December 2008 and then closed in February 2009. Since then, I have been working fulltime at XING as the company's Chief Product Officer. And while I've surely kept up on Twitter, I haven't had much time for blogging and also haven't spent much time pimping socialmedian in the blogosphere as we've been very focused on getting some new projects going with XING. XING is really committed to being a leader in the next phase of the evolution of social media and it's really fun to be part of that effort. It's also really cool for me to be working for XING in Hamburg, Germany, and for a brash American social media dude to be impacting and influencing the growth and globalization of a European internet leader.
So, what does all this mean for socialmedian? What happens when a little website like socialmedian gets gobbled up by a XING? Does socialmedian have a future with XING?
One of the key projects I have been working on since I got to XING has been implementing the open-social platform on XING. This will enable XING and its partners to rapidly launch rich applications which enrich the XING user experience by tapping into the social-graph of relationships on XING.
I'm thrilled to announce that 3 months after XING closed the deal to acquire socialmedian, we just went live with two socialmedian-built applications on XING. The first beta testers now have access to the apps, which will distribute virally on XING. One, XING News, is a social news service in German, English, Spanish, and Turkish languages. It is basically socialmedian on XING, enabling XING members to get news filtered by their XING contacts, share stories of interest, discuss/comment, etc. The second is ASK Xing, which enables XING members to ask questions and get answers from the XING network. Both were built on the open-social framework which we are also launching Monday. We are going to start with these two socialmedian-team-built apps, and then in the following weeks launch several partner applications, of which we have many in testing now.
Follow this link to the full post and screenshots.
And here is my post on the same subject on XING's corporate blog.
Hi everyone.
Last week I wrote my first blog post for XING as the company's new Chief Product Officer, introducing our new concept of "Ship it!".
Ship it! is all about building the future of XING with our users. Under the Ship it! model, we will launch new products and enhancements on the XING website faster than ever before in a rapid agile development model and then gather user feedback on how to make our products better. Ship It! means we will launch products early in their lifecycle, before they are finished, and then work with you to evolve them and improve them.
I'm excited to report that right at this moment we are doing our first "Ship It!"
The new "Company Pages" button - including a shiny BETA.
About 20,000 XING users now have access to a new feature, "Company Pages". Work on this new feature area was underway at XING for many months but it was previously not scheduled to be launched on the site for many more months. Under our new Ship It! model, we've decided to go ahead and starting introducing Company Pages (beta) to our users now - before it is finished - so that we can build it with your feedback. 20,000 users were granted access to the new XING Company Pages today. That number will increase to more than 500,000 in the coming days, and then ultimately the entire XING user-base will have access to our Company Pages.
Last week I was named Chief Product Officer at XING. As part of this move we'll be bringing the socialmedian rapid iteration model to XING.
Here's a link to my first blog post as CPO of XING, describing the new XING model which we call "Ship It!"
Here also is a summary of that post:
Here's a link to my first blog post as CPO of XING, describing the new XING model which we call "Ship It!"
Here also is a summary of that post:
Hello there! By way of introduction I'm Jason Goldberg and I'm the new Chief Product Officer here at XING. What does that mean? Well, in short it means that I'm responsible for gathering feedback from XING's users and translating that into great products and enhancements that meet your needs. In other words, my team runs the "give them what they want" department here at XING - and there's nothing cooler than that!
Prior to joining XING I founded a company called socialmedian which enables people to get the news filtered by their networks. One of the things I'm most proud of about socialmedian is the way that we built it based on direct input from our users. Every day we gathered user feedback as to what we could do better. Our model was to ship early and often and then gather feedback, and repeat, repeat, repeat.
That's exactly what we are going to be doing here at XING now, just on a much larger scale.Our awesome team of product managers, user experience designers, and software developers, have adopted a new motto at XING and it's called, "Ship it!". Ship it! means that we will be adding more enhancements faster than ever before and then relying on you, our users, to let us know what you like, don't like, and want to see made better.
Our goal through all this is to increase engagement and reliance. We want to build on the great foundation at XING and deliver a more engaging user experience - one that our users love and rely on every day for their essential business networking needs. In order to get there though, we need your help. We need your input and feedback now more than ever.
The new product development model
Here's what you can expect to see from XING under our new Ship It! product development model:
- We will launch new features on XING faster than ever before.
- We will launch new features before they are finished. Our plan is to get new stuff out there on the site and learn from our users as to how to make them better. You tell us what you like, don't like, and want to see improved - and then we'll do our best to keep up with your input.
- We will make XING more appealing and relevant to users around the world.
- We will actively ask for your feedback and participate in a dialogue with you as to how we can improve and better meet your needs. Expect to see a whole new social-media approach to how we gather feedback. Expect to really get to know the people behind product development at XING. And, challenge us publicly to deliver what you need.
For more information on our new "Ship It!" approach to product development at XING, see this interview with me from The Next Web last week. I'm serious about this user engagement and feedback stuff!
You can also email me via XING with any advice or comments at anytime. And, don't forget to follow me on Twitter where I tweet on social media topics.
Our first Ship It! new stuff launches in a couple of weeks and then weekly after that....stay tuned for more details! It's going to be a fantastic spring for XING.
-jason
Since being acquired by XING in December 2008, the socialmedian team has been busy working on a number of very important strategic product initiatives which will be launched over the course of this spring. In the coming months we'll be launching a series of new features both on socialmedian and on XING.
We're rolling out the first such initiative today: Facebook Connect on socialmedian.
As of today, Facebook Connect is a preferred way for people to login and participate on socialmedian.
Users can now sign-up for socialmedian using their Facebook account with just one-click.
Once connected, users can then instantly and easily share news from socialmedian with their Facebook network. In embracing Facebook Connect, essentially we are handing the user identity, profile and social graph over to Facebook. We'll focus on being the best social network-filtered news service in the world, leveraging the power of Facebook to help make that happen.
The way it works is as follows:
We're rolling out the first such initiative today: Facebook Connect on socialmedian.
As of today, Facebook Connect is a preferred way for people to login and participate on socialmedian.
Users can now sign-up for socialmedian using their Facebook account with just one-click.
Once connected, users can then instantly and easily share news from socialmedian with their Facebook network. In embracing Facebook Connect, essentially we are handing the user identity, profile and social graph over to Facebook. We'll focus on being the best social network-filtered news service in the world, leveraging the power of Facebook to help make that happen.
The way it works is as follows:
- If you already have a socialmedian account, log out of socialmedian and sign-in again using Facebook Connect. Once you are logged in, you can then merge your existing account.
- To create a new account, just sign up for socialmedian using Facebook Connect.
- Once connected, you can easily share content from socialmedian to Facebook. You can automatically (or manually) share with Facebook whenever you find an interesting news clip on socialmedian, write a comment, or like/dislike a story.
Your shared content from socialmedian will appear in your Facebook contact's News Feed. Each share from socialmedian will be clearly designated with the blue s|m icon so your friends know when you are sharing news with them. In the example below (image of my Facebook News Feed) you can see that several of my friends have recently shared news from socialmedian to Facebook.
It's that easy! socialmedian + Facebook Connect is the easiest way to share news with your friends online.
As always, please contact us and let us know if you have any problems or sugestions for making socialmedian work better for you.
As always, please contact us and let us know if you have any problems or sugestions for making socialmedian work better for you.
- Facebook has hit the 175,000,000 active user mark, just 5 weeks after it hit 150 million users in January. At this rate, Facebook has been growing by well over 600,000 users per day over the last several weeks, continuing the company's torrid growth pace.
- If Facebook were a country, it would now be the 6th most populous in the world.
- Almost 1 million people in Italy joined in JANUARY 2009, or over 1.6% of the national population, joined Facebook in January ALONE.
- Over 500,00 people in Spain joined Facebook in January ALONE.
- The number of people on Facebook grew by over 10% monthly in 52 countries in January. It grew by over 20% monthly in January in 13 countries.
- Facebook's monthly growth accelerated by at least 25% in 30 countries in January vs. December 2008.
- The number of Facebook users in Indonesia grew by nearly 40% to over 1.1 million in January - the fastest of any country.
- 45% of Facebook's US audience is now 26 years old or older.
- The fastest growing segment in the US: Women over 55, up 175.3% in the last 120 days. Facebook growing faster with women than men in almost every age group.
socialmedian now has an easy friend finder so you can easily find and subscribe to your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and Hotmail friends who are already on socialmedian.
You probably have already won! There's a good chance that several of your contacts are already using socialmedian.
When you connect socialmedian and Facebook socialmedian will also enable you to automatically follow your Facebook friends if they should ever join socialmedian in the future.
What to connect with your Twitter buddies? Just enter your Twitter ID (no password required) ...
And then one-click to follow them!
You probably have already won! There's a good chance that several of your contacts are already using socialmedian.When you connect socialmedian and Facebook socialmedian will also enable you to automatically follow your Facebook friends if they should ever join socialmedian in the future.
What to connect with your Twitter buddies? Just enter your Twitter ID (no password required) ...
And then one-click to follow them!
File under "you asked for it, you've got it:" socialmedian today is launching simple one-click filters. This was one of our most frequent recent user request.
socialmedian users can now filter their "my networks" and "my newsmakers" tabs by the following criteria with just one click on an icon:
We'll be launching more filters soon. Suggestions? Feedback?
Thanks!
socialmedian users can now filter their "my networks" and "my newsmakers" tabs by the following criteria with just one click on an icon:
- Filter out stories I've already read (remove my clips) -- YAY!!!
- Show me the most popular stories of today, or of this week.
- Filter out all 3rd party services from the current view (e.g. Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Google Reader, etc.)
- You can also combine filters (e.g. show me the most popular stories of today that I have not clipped and not including Twitter stories).
We'll be launching more filters soon. Suggestions? Feedback?
Thanks!
We launched a new feature today on socialmedian, "News Flash" -- it will be fun to see where this one goes and how it develops based on user feedback.
Disclosure: We're pretty darn excited about this one!
socialmedian is all about getting the news, filtered by your network. News Flash makes that even more possible.
socialmedian's new News Flash feature enables any user to create a News Flash on a story and broadcast it to their network. When creating a News Flash, you can create a new headline for the story.
In the example here you see I'm writing a News Flash with the headline "Clamp The Show On The Other Foot: Put The SEC on Trial"
I've also selected to send this News Flash to my followers on Twitter.
The News Flash is then broadcasted via the news socialmedian News Flash Ticker on the top of user's homepages, as seen here.
The Ticker is updated every few seconds with the latest News Flashes from socialmedian users. That's a quick and easy way for any user to get on the socialmedian front page!
Here's how it looks like from the unlogged-in socialmedian front page:
And, my new flashy headline for this story is seen by my followers:
Disclosure: We're pretty darn excited about this one!
The foundation for the News Flash feature came from user requests to make it more meaningful to be a Newsmaker on socialmedian. Newmakers wanted better ways to alert their followers to hot stories and breaking news. We also had several users ask us if they could create flashy alternative headlines for hot stories, similar to say how Matt Drudge does on the DrudgeReport.
socialmedian is all about getting the news, filtered by your network. News Flash makes that even more possible.
socialmedian's new News Flash feature enables any user to create a News Flash on a story and broadcast it to their network. When creating a News Flash, you can create a new headline for the story.
In the example here you see I'm writing a News Flash with the headline "Clamp The Show On The Other Foot: Put The SEC on Trial"
I've also selected to send this News Flash to my followers on Twitter.
The News Flash is then broadcasted via the news socialmedian News Flash Ticker on the top of user's homepages, as seen here.
The Ticker is updated every few seconds with the latest News Flashes from socialmedian users. That's a quick and easy way for any user to get on the socialmedian front page!
Here's how it looks like from the unlogged-in socialmedian front page:
And, my new flashy headline for this story is seen by my followers:
This is just the beginning of the news flash feature. We'll be adding to this very quickly.
Please pass along suggestions.
Please pass along suggestions.
