Xing, the social network for professionals that has quite a lot of traction in Europe, has announced its purchase of socialMedian, a social news aggregator startup which came out of private beta just a few months ago, for approximately $7.5m. Jason Goldberg, socialmedian´s founder and CEO, will join Xing’s headquarters in Hamburg heading up Xing’s newly created Applications Platform division.

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch provides some context:

“The Applications Platform division former Jobster CEO Goldberg will be heading is an entirely new business unit and will likely take a page from the application strategy that both LinkedIn and Facebook exhibit. It will basically enable application developers and content providers to connect to the XING platform. Goldberg’s first job will be launching OpenSocial on XING (due this Spring), after which he’ll concentrate on making strategic partnerships with service providers that can bring added value to XING’s member base on a professional level.”

Rafat Ali at paidContent says of the deal:

“Xing is a lot like LinkedIn, and has been hugely ambitious in its expansion over the last year or so, and will likely use Socialmedian to help expand its professional services for users. This also helps it guard against LinkedIn and Facebook’s own international expansion.”

Facebook growth surges outside of US
Justin Smith at Inside Facebook reports that the social networking site is growing by over 600,000 users a day, a number Silicon Alley Insider puts into context as a Boston-sized population, though Smith points out the growth is predominantly outside the US. Based on Facebook’s own engagement stats Smith sums up the obvious conclusion:

“Facebook’s growth is speeding up and engagement is increasing.”

As to how this growth will affect Facebook’s revenue prospects, Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider writes:

“… we’ll believe in Facebook’s magical revenue product when we see it. But here’s the bottom line. Worst case, Facebook disappoints investors by becoming a mediocre display business with revenues approaching a billion dollars a year. Best case, Facebook figures out a way to turn all that it knows about its users and how they interact with each other and the web into some kind of shazam-pow! ad product on the level of Google AdWords. And then, with all its crazy growth, Facebook will be suddenly worth way more than $15 billion.”

ReadWriteWeb’s coverage of the story points to a handy online tool from AllFacebook which you can use to chart Facebook usage by country, gender and age range, with the ability to compare up to three countries at a time.

Magazines still don’t get the web
Jeff Jarvis points to this piece by John Koblin in this week’s Observer on the state of magazines online post-industry crash. Commenting on a Condé Nast source who says “the web isn’t really a priority”, Jarvis says:

“I’ve long believed that magazines should have great potential online because they already have communities of shared interest. And though magazines still – today – have franchises and value in print, it would be foolish, even suicidal to ignore other media already overtaken by the internet tidal wave. Music drowned. TV learned from that and started streaming online. Newspapers are going down for the third and last time. Magazines haven’t learned from that. The glossy monthlies may think they’re safe because they’re glossy but Time Magazine used to be huge and now it’s so thin I could use it to cut cheese. The weeklies, with their high costs and general interests, are dying just behind newspapers. Will the monthlies be next? I wouldn’t gamble against it, as some magazine publishers are doing.”

In a somewhat related story, the latest findings from The Bivings Group’ report into America’s largest newspapers’ use of the internet show that US newspapers are making slow but discernible progress in incorporating web features in their operations.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has helpfully annotated some graphs representing the key findings:

“Nearly every newspaper site has reporter-written blogs and some form of video; features that elicit content from readers are on the rise; podcasts and mandatory registrations are down; social networking features are pretty much non-existent.”