Sven Eppert

Just explored on XING the new Map feature in my address book - something I have waited for nearly two years after having looked closer at location-based services and their possibilities to interact with social networks. Currently, this mash-up based on Google Maps just displays the business address of my own contacts with the possibilities to just display them by tags. Of course, XING has taken serious any privacy concerns and is just mapping the addresses which have also been released for me.

As XING’s VP Product & Engineering, Felix Menden, clearly states in his blog post this is just the beginning of many possibilities to bring the dimension of location into social networking and hence increase radical the value of XING to its users. Beyond thinking of bringing this feature to your mobile while on the go, other possibilities include to connect it with users’ current and future locations. Platforms such as Plazes or Dopplr, among others, deal with this and would bring certainly value to business travelers.

Plazes (disclosure: portfolio company of my employer b-to-v) for instance just put more focus on developers with its platform plazes.net allowing them to use their API more efficiently, also beyond MAC address geo-targeting. Furthermore, the recent acquistion of Bluetooth-based location service Imity with Zyb reveals that mobile applications are becoming more compelling to users by implementing the most important feature location, and thus becoming real mobile social networks. More use cases we will see soon in this space - hopefully also on XING.