Despite being virtually unknown in the US, and still somewhat hemmed in by its core German speaking market, XING, the LinkedIn competitor, refuses to lie down. And like a scene from the Rocky movie, it’s going into training to become better, quicker and faster than the LinkedIn machine. Although let’s face it, it has it’s work cut out as LinkedIn is now worth over $1bn and has 43 million members to XING’s 7.5 million. XING however is worth $213m and is publicly traded. And today XING launches a partner ecosystem based on 16 (count’em) OpenSocial applications from 13 partners, in 7 countries. LinkedIn currently has 9 applications.

Some XING apps will be be familiar to LinkedIn users: they will both have SlideShare and online workspaces from Huddle. But XING has has sourced heavily from European sources with apps from Doodle, Dopplr, Deutsche Welle, MindMeister, spreed, travelload, Tungle, sueddeutsche.de, Wallstreet:Online, WELT ONLINE and ZCOPE. The applications spread from news and project management through to travel planning and data sharing. As data protection and security are much more of a consideration in the EU, this is the world’s largest completely SSL-encrypted https installation of OpenSocial.