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Xing is one of the top business social networks in the market today, especially in Europe. But the new features they're touting for the paid Premium users are grossly underwhelming.

In general terms, the platform is solid. The free functionality is more than adequate for the kind of networking you'd do on LinkedIn or any other professional site. But we have a hard time imagining anyone eagerly laying down cash for the ability to upload their resume and get birthday reminders.

Socialmedian, a social news site designed to allow users to group around news networks, has been acquired by the German social network XING, a major international player with more than 6 million business users.

Clearly, this is a big win for Socialmedian, which only recently came out of private beta.

Last November we asked you, "In 6 months time, will you have more business contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn?" 62% of you said LinkedIn, and only about a quarter chose Facebook. It's now been about six months, so how do the two services stack up? Has Facebook caught up with LinkedIn for Facebook? Will it ever? And what about Xing?

I first used LinkedIn for business development and wrote about the experience here. In summary, it is one the best new sales tools since the rolodex - as Alex Iskold noted this week. But like a rolodex, it is only as good as the contacts in it and the skill of the person using it.

Recently I have been using it for headhunting. From talking to both Xing and LinkedIn management, I understand that headhunting is the primary use case - at least as a revenue driver for them.

Last November, we asked you if in 6 months time Facebook would have more business contacts than LinkedIn. Over 2/3rds of you thought that LinkedIn would still be the dominant business networking tool. It hasn't quite been six months, but a lot has changed since then, and Facebook looks poised to make a serious run at the business networking crowd.

In December when Facebook launched its friend lists feature, we theorized that it was a necessary first step that the network would need to take to attract the business social networking crowd. We also noted, however, that the the friend lists feature had no teeth without being tied to privacy controls. Today, Facebook announced that it would soon be updating privacy controls to make use of the friend lists feature, among other enhancements.

Increasingly people accept that Facebook serves a different function than LinkedIn. In simple terms: deals on LinkedIn, dates on Facebook. This simple reality was obscured for a while, because the Silicon Valley crowd use Facebook (as it is the new, new thing) and so they extrapolated incorrectly that the rest of the world will work that way too. It looked like a contest between the Facebook hipsters and LinkedIn suits. But the real race for business networking has two horses. LinkedIn is clearly one. The other is not Facebook, but Xing.

TechCrunch's Mike Butcher reports about Turkish social network Yonja's $12.5 million worth of funding and asks, "What is it about Turkey?." As a Turkish native, I think I am the right person to answer that question and also, this can be an opportunity to shed some light on the latest intriguing developments at Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, and Ning, as they relate to the European and world social networking markets.