Xing, impressions, not impressed

[fallenpegasus]

I just signed up at Xing.com, https://www.xing.com/profile/Mark_Atwood

First impressions, less than impressed. I can't see what it brings to the party that LinkedIn, Facebook, Biznik, FriendFeed, Plaxo, or Pathable don't already do better.

Let's start with such basic stuff as it's use/abuse of the "3rd party password" antipattern to get my GMail contacts. There is no excuse for that, use the Google Contacts API.

The process of adding contacts really should be run thru a UI review, watching and listening to untrained users operating it. It's pretty user-slow and clunky.

That the "My other profiles on the web" doesn't have LinkedIn, Facebook, Biznik, Plaxo, or FriendFeed as an option is anti-social and insulting to the users.

It doesn't seem to make any effort to pull or track date from any of the other "other profiles", either automatically or on demand, instead wanting me to fill in all my data again. Boring and wrong. Once again, making things harder for the users.

It's also not very fast.


There are many good things about it. It appears to be very multi-lingual and i18n aware (which explains why it's so popular in Europe), and has a rich set of display privacy options

Comments

[helix90.livejournal.com]

I am on Xing only because of the F5 folks in Europe that are. They use it instead of LinkedIn. They should really be considered close to identical, which means one of them should go away some time. The pond is big enough for one frog only.