*Start rant*
Xing (formally openBC – a much better name) is really starting to annoy me.

And it’s not down to their annoying use of the word ‘articles’ instead of ‘threads’ or ‘posts’ on their discussion groups. Or the ridiculous amount of non-English content that gets into my view of the site even though I’ve chosen not to view anything other than English content.

No ladies and gentlemen I have a far bigger beef with ‘Xing’ – they have no RSS feeds. Don’t get me wrong.. they have RSS feeds for their blog, their press releases and their podcast. But if you want something that’s actually on the site – it’s all up to the group owner.

The group owner gets to decide (and they have to, it’s off by default) whether the users of the group can subscribe to their RSS feed in order to keep up to date with new posts. The group owner – the majority of which aren’t as active as you’d think, get to decide how usable their group is. To show you how bad it is, of my sixteen groups I am subscribed to – three have RSS feeds.

Now – why RSS feeds you ask? Because with my subscription to sixteen of the most active groups on the site (and all them get at least 50-100 posts a day), what does Xing offer to keep up with this? A hard limit of 10 pages of latest posts to browse through… most of which aren’t even in English. Something that basically gets out dated every three to four hours.

Another thing that annoys me is they show nothing towards developing or enhancing the site – but can post once a week (on the dot, it’s very obviously time tabled) on their blog about something that is never really news, but more of a ‘this is an entry from our help section’ update.

Could it be that they hired someone to build the site as a ‘one off’ job? – of course it is.

*End rant*

Tags: little things, web apps, xing

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