Xing acquires social news site Socialmedian

Xing will continue to grow Socialmedian as a standalone network, which only recently came out of beta testing after launching in August. Xing also confirmed that the two companies would launch integrated products in the new year.

Socialmedian CEO Jason Goldberg, who previously founded Jobster, will transfer to Hamburg in the newly created role of vice president of Xing applications platform where he will connect application developers and content providers with the Xing network.

Socialmedian filters news stories through users social networks and has signed up more than 19,000 users since its initial launch.

The top networks on the site are all social media related -- social media watch, Web 2.0, Tech News, Social Networking and Twitter.

Goldberg said: "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."

Over 6.5m professionals already use LinkedIn rival Xing to track of information in their networks. With Socialmedian, Xing plans to launch several new products, including offering Xing members custom filtered news service.

Lars Hinrichs, CEO and founder of Xing, said: "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."

This article was first published on brandrepublic.com