Thoughts from life.

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Website Social Median has been bought by Xing. According to a press release that I awoke to read this morning. Here is the press release I received this morning from Jason Goldberg CEO of Social Median.

I am thrilled to announce that socialmedian is being acquired by XING of Hamburg, Germany.

This is great news for socialmedian's members as XING is committed to growing and developing socialmedian both as a standalone service as well launching integrated socialmedian services on XING, one of the leading online business networks in the world.

The entire socialmedian team will be joining XING as part of the acquisition.  I will be relocating to Hamburg, where I will lead up a major new initiative for XING, the XING Application Platform.  In this new role, in addition to strengthening and enhancing the socialmedian service, I will also be responsible for managing global partnerships for application developers and content providers to connect with the XING network.

This is an awesome development for socialmedian. 

socialmedian delivers the news, filtered by your network.  XING is one of the leading global online networks and is rapidly growing around the world with nearly 7 million members, up from 4.8 million in 2007.  Together, socialmedian & XING will connect people with the people, information, and resources they need to get their jobs done, follow their interests, and pursue their passions.

More details immediately below. 

• Here's a link to the official press release
• Here's a link to XING's blog post by XING CEO Lars Hinrichs announcing the deal.

XING AG purchases socialmedian Inc.

• Transaction enables a  technological jump on integrating business news into Europe's leading business network
• Socialmedian CEO Jason Goldberg joins XING in Hamburg, Germany in the newly created position of Vice President XING Applications Platform
• The company will launch integrated products in 2009
  

Hamburg / New York, December 19, 2008. The publicly listed XING AG (O1BC / ISIN DE000XNG888) announces today it has purchased New York-based socialmedian Inc., a leading innovator in the social news industry. The socialmedian solution enables people to get the news filtered by their social networks.  Socialmedian debuted in 2008 and has rapidly grown a highly engaged user-base.  Socialmedian is thus a natural fit with XING, a leading global online social network for professionals. Socialmedian's founder and CEO, Jason Goldberg, will join XING in Hamburg, Germany in the newly created position of Vice President XING Applications Platform.
"XING is a uniquely active and innovative platform in business networking, offering real value for its members on a global scale. Combining XING with socialmedian's next generation social news technology offers great potential to deliver highly engaging content and services to business professionals worldwide," said Jason Goldberg. In the new role of VP XING Applications Platform, Goldberg will be responsible for managing global partnerships for application developers and content providers to connect with the XING network.   
Success in business depends on access to the right information at the right time. The rise of the Internet has increased both the speed of information and the sheer volume of data. In addition to traditional media companies, social media such as blogs, tweets, videos and other user-generated websites now provide daily news, leading to a veritable flood of information. Time-strapped professionals are left to parse through numerous news sources for relevant information and sort, organize, and share stories on their own. socialmedian does this for you, gathering information from about 19,000 sources, including social services such as Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, FriendFeed, the international blogosphere, and industry and online media sources, and then filtering your news through your social networking contacts. Thus enabling people to get the news they need to know for their jobs, their interests, and their passions through the people in their networks.
Over 6.5 million business professionals, managers, and experts use XING to keep track of information and updates in their professional network. Working with socialmedian, XING plans to launch several new innovations, including offering XING members custom filtered news.  "We want to offer our members the greatest value in their networks, and this includes having the relevant news at their fingertips. Now we have the technology necessary to do so. We're also excited to have someone like Jason working with us to develop the XING ecosystem of partnerships with leading companies around the world," said Lars Hinrichs, CEO and founder of XING AG.
XING will continue to grow and enhance socialmedian as a standalone service. There will be no interruption for socialmedian users.

About socialmedian:
Socialmedian delivers the news, filtered by your network. socialmedian's mission is to help people discover the news and information they need to succeed at their jobs, pursue their passions and stay informed about the world around them.  Since launching in August, socialmedian users have created more than 2500 topical news networks, ranging from iPhone to campaign 2008 to the global financial crisis, aggregating newsfeeds and user feeds from more than 19.000 sources with 800 new stories added every minute. The NY-based company was founded by former Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg and is currently backed by Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive and leading angel investors including Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Reed Hundt, former FCC Chairman and Allen Morgan of the Mayfield Fund. For more information, please visit www.socialmedian.com.
About XING
XING is the leading network for business contacts in Europe. Far more than a directory of business contacts, XING makes your professional network an active part of your life, enabling members to discover professional people, opportunities and privileges through its unique discovery capability and advanced contact management tools. With the successful IPO of XING as the first Web 2.0 company to go public, XING AG has had a long-term impact on the social networking trend amongst professionals. By focusing on the target group 'business people worldwide', the company is able to offer tailored features, thereby making networking and contact management simpler. Besides Headquarters in Hamburg, XING AG is also represented with offices in Barcelona, Istanbul and Beijing.
XING. Powering Relationships.

On a whim today I entered Mashable's contest to receive one of 25 private invites to Streamy a slick feed-based service that’s drawing comparisons to Digg. Low and behold I won an invite. Here are my initial thoughts after playing with it for the better part of 2 hours, I like what I see. Would I call it a Digg killer as some are saying. At this point no. Streamy is as they say a slick new feed based service. I would call it a nice rss social feed reader / community builder service. What streamy I think is doing better then Digg is they are creating a social community out of rss feeds.
The first thing that sticks out is the community aspect of streamy which resembles any social networking site. You can post comments and share articles from the feeds. The difference is the communities are built around groups that are formed from the rss feeds that you subscribe to. The home page recommends articles which have been determined by some formula which depends on what you have read over at streamy and saved.
This is where digg and Streamy differ Digg Users vote up articles they like and they get to the front page. Basically the users are sorting out the articles....same idea over at streamy, except streamy allows you to create groups based on feeds and than share them with other friends.
It is these groups that begin to create the sense of community within streamy.

Here is a screen shot of a group homepage:

The middleish area shows you some of the members of the group, while beneath it is the group stream which I call the group wall cause it works similar to how your wall is on facebook. In the group stream recently group shared articles show up, and you can also post quick notes to the group. Now in the above picture if you look at the middle skinny column this is where group threads show up. You can start a thread for discussing things with group members. Just from all this you can see how streamy harnesses more of the community then digg.

All in all at this point I like streamy enough to start using it as my feed reader instead of sage. What's nice is being able to see who else has subscribed to the feeds I like and the ability to start to create a community based upon my feeds. The concept behind streamy is great.

At this point streamy is in a private beta, but when invitations become available I will be more than happy to send out invites.