The SlideShare Facebook app has lately been getting some love from business bloggers & commentators. Check these out :

BeAWealthyEntrepreneur.com in its write up How I Grew My Client Base with FaceBook says -
“…..slideshare is know as the largest community for sharing presentations. I upload my powerpoint, openoffice, Keynote or PDF files and view presentations shared by others. This is a great way to spread thought leadership and expertise through presentations you may have delivered locally.”

frenchcreekpress.com in its write up Five tips for a successful Facebook fan page says -
“Raid your archives: Content is king – so what to do if you don’t have any content to share? Don’t underestimate yourself. If you’ve got PowerPoint presentations, use slideshare.net and an RSS feed to leverage them on your FB page….” .

Then again, in a subsequent writeup, it says “….Well, this is a no brainer. Instead of using Involver’s Slides for Pages app, just use SlideShare’s own app to share your presentations on your page. Link your Facebook account with your SlideShare account and fans will see your latest presentations as well as those you’ve marked as a favorite. Don’t forget to add both a tab and a box to the page to make it easier for fans to find your presentations.”

Taragana.com in its blogpost Top 10 Facebook Apps for Business writes “…This is world’s largest community for sharing presentations where you can upload your PowerPoint, OpenOffice, PDF files or Keynote. Further you can view presentations by others. It’s provides a great way to share your presentations on your profile.”

Sitewire.net in Top 5 Apps For Your Facebook Profile has this to say “…The Slideshare app is the world’s largest community for sharing digital presentations. You can upload PowerPoint, OpenOffice or PDF files and view presentations shared by others. This is an awesome way to spread thought leadership and expertise through new or existing presentations.”

Big thanks to these folks. In case you haven’t added SlideShare to your Facebook profile, go here to do so.

SlideShare goes wherever professionals would want to share presentations & documents. XING is the largest professional network in Europe and many of our users are from Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, France. Today, we are delighted to announce that SlideShare users can now share presentations & documents on XING.

XING has launched its platform today, and we are thrilled that SlideShare is one of the first partners on that platform. Along with SlideShare are other professional applications such as Huddle.net and Dopplr.com.

Think of XING as another place to share your presentations & documents with a professional circle. Another place to get more views and connect with people. You can also checkout what your network has been sharing. Our presentation below will tell you more.

To add SlideShare to your Xing profile, go here.

(if you don’t have a XING account, you might need to signup for one… takes a minute)

Just in case you were not aware, XING is based out of Hamburg, Germany. It has 7.5 million registered members. And here’s a piece of trivia you could care for - in 2006, XING had its IPO and this made it the first Web 2.0 company in the world to go public. WOW!

Something else you should know: With this SlideShare has now established its presence on three of the world’s largest networks for businesses & professionals - LinkedIn, Facebook & XING. If you add these apps and sync them to your SlideShare account, you get a four way sharing. Upload your presentation to any of these four - SlideShare, LinkedIn, Facebook & Xing - it will be published on all four simultaneously!… all in one click!

To add SlideShare to your Xing profile, go here.

Important Update: Some users have expressed confusion on not being able to “upload a SlideShare presentation to a Facebook page”. Just to clarify, it’s not possible to directly upload to a Facebook page. To show your presentations on a page, you need to first add the SlideShare app to a regular Facebook user account and add your Facebook page to this account. After this you need to assign yourself as the administrator/owner of this page. Once this is done, presentations from your SlideShare app will show on your Facebook page and remain in sync.

One of our most requested features on the newly launched Facebook App was the ability to add it to Facebook Pages. We are glad to announce that it is now possible to do just that. Just follow the steps below:

1. Make sure you add the SlideShare app to your profile first. Then, goto the SlideShare application’s profile page and click on “more” to display more options. Choose “Add to my Page”

2. A popup will show you a list of pages you currently own or administer. Choose the page you want to add SlideShare to. For this example, we’ll choose “Rockstars Cafe”

3. Goto your Facebook page and click on “Edit Page” as shown.

4. Under the list of Applications available on the page, you’ll see “SlideShare”. Click on the small pen icon next to it and choose “Edit”

5. You’ll be taken to the Pages settings section, which allows you to specify the SlideShare user who’s presentations will sync to the presentations showing on the Page. If you did not install the SlideShare app as mentioned in (1), you’ll be prompted to do so. If an administrator is already set for this page, you’ll be given the option to change the account. Non-administrators will not be allowed to access this section.

6. Once this is done, return to your Page and you’ll see the SlideShare app under the Boxes tab on your page. You can move it to your Wall tab if you want.

Your Facebook Page will stay in sync with the chosen page administrator’s account. Do share your Facebook page URL’s with us after adding the SlideShare app.

We’re happy to announce that our relaunched Facebook app has been verified by those awesome folks at Facebook. Facebook rolled out this program yesterday and only a select few from the thousands of Facebook applications have made it to the verified list. We had to work in close co-ordination with the Facebook team to ensure that we satisfy the strict standards for this program. Our app is part of the Business & Finance section of Facebook’s application directory.

If add the SlideShare app to your Facebook profile, go here.

If you have any feedback, let us know in the comments.

We’re happy to announce the relaunch of the SlideShare app on Facebook. We have completely rebuilt it, integrated the latest Facebook changes and made it more useful.

To add SlideShare to your Facebook profile, go here.

You can create an account on the SlideShare Facebook app and link it to your regular SlideShare.net account. How does that help? Well, once you do that, any presentations (or documents) you upload on SlideShare will instantly be available on Facebook or if you upload them on Facebook, they’ll be available on SlideShare.

It doesn’t end there, of course. If you’ve added the SlideShare app for LinkedIn and linked your SlideShare account there, your presentations will automatically be visible on LinkedIn too!

In fact we strongly recommend you link both your LinkedIn & Facebook accounts to your SlideShare.net account. Once this happens, you have a HOLY TRIAD in place. Upload to any one- SlideShare, Facebook or LinkedIn and it will shows up instantly on all three. Isn’t that really cool?

Using the new Facebook app is a real breeze! We’ve tried to keep the interface consistent across SlideShare, LinkedIn and Facebook, so if you’ve used our app before, it should be really easy to get started with it on Facebook.

With the SlideShare app on Facebook, you can

• Upload your presentations and documents to SlideShare
• Share them instantly with your friends by publishing to your home page
• Comment on or favorite presentations by your friends
• Add a SlideShare box to your profile to display your presentations

If you already had added the app to Facebook, you don’t need to do anything, unless you want to link it to your SlideShare account.

Take a look at some of the screenshots below to see what you can do:

We’ll be adding more features to the app over the next few weeks, so we’ll be glad to hear any feedback from you or if you find any bugs.

To add SlideShare to your Facebook profile, go here.

Earlier this year, SlideShare developed and released a mobile version of the site using Yahoo’s Blueprint platform.

Thanks to that, Yahoo! has put SlideShare in their developer spotlight at the Yahoo Developer Network.

In the video below, Rashmi Sinha, CEO, SlideShare and Jon Boutelle, CTO, SlideShare talk about how the mobile site was built and future plans for SlideShare.

Download a high quality version from the YDN theatre page.

Like many others on the web, we write and communicate with our members in a fluid and spontaneous manner using blogs, email, and twitter. Sometimes, in that spontaneity, one can make a hasty and regrettable decision. On March 31st, we (SlideShare) made a mistake which impacted many of you. It was an April Fool’s prank and was not intended to offend and cause negative impact. Many of you found it funny and told us so. But many others did not. Please accept our whole-hearted apologies.

In this post, I would like to go beyond apologies and share what lessons we have learned.

But first, some background on how the prank came to be. Celebrating April Fools with a joke is something of a Silicon Valley tradition. Last year, we made a hoax announcement that SlideShare would not allow bullets in presentations anymore since Edward Tufte had joined our board. Many of you found this amusing and this year, we wanted to play an April Fool’s joke again.

We had been racking our brains for past two weeks, but unable to come up with a good joke. It was March 31st and we had to come up with something fast. We came up with what seemed like a simple, cute idea- just add two zeroes to presentation views, and send out an email telling people about it, asking them to tweet it. We feel a close connection with our users, like they are dear friends, and our prank reflected that - something you might do to a dear friend and then say “Ha!, its April 1st!”

The prank had repercussions far beyond we had imagined.

We set the email to be sent out at 5.00 AM PST on April 1st. Around 5.15 AM PST, my cofounder Amit, who is based in New Delhi called me saying a few twitter reactions to email indicated that prank was having impact that we had not anticipated. I woke up groggily and we decided to immediately stop emails. I called up a sleepy SlideShare_Dan who stopped the email server. By this time, many emails had already queued up and app 5-6% of our users had already been sent the email. The damage had been done.

Some quick lessons.
1) Don’t pull off a prank without thinking through its repercussions clearly and thoroughly. (We simply did not spend enough time thinking this through, and there were many unintended aspects). We overlooked both first and second order effects.

2) If you play an April Fool’s joke, make sure it’s apparent in the first 30 seconds that it is a joke (as many of our users pointed out, the message itself should have indicated it was a prank. For example, a link leading to a page with “Its an April Fools’ joke”). Or maybe if we had added three more zeroes (five overall), it would have been clear it was a joke (or bug). In retrospect, that seems such an obvious idea. Duh! But this was not clear to me on March 31st.

3) Statistics are sacred. (don’t mess with them, even in a prank!)

I won’t go on. There are many smart social media experts (who are members of SlideShare) and spoke up with great ideas about how we could have handled it better. I want to tell our users who voiced an opinion - we hear you loudly and clearly. We will take your views into account.

Some long-term lessons
We know people use SlideShare in business-centric ways. But we were surprised by how many people were using it for client work. They were the most upset, as they had conveyed the numbers to their clients. A special word of apology to anyone who was impacted in this manner.

It’s been a sobering moment inside SlideShare. From a small website, we have grown and people are using us in all sort of business-centric ways. We know that, but we need to keep this in mind more. Many of you pointed out on, SlideShare is not a YouTube, which is for entertainment. It’s more like a LinkedIn, for professionals to use.

So here is what we are doing. We are reaching out to some of our toughest critics on blogs / twitter directly. We will try to understand better how they are using SlideShare, and also post some email interviews with users on our blog.

We are also putting together a survey of our users so that we can understand better just how people are using SlideShare in their business. I think this will be a good thing for the SlideShare team to have a better understanding of our users, and keep the different uses in mind as we build features or do community things.

Most of all, we will not repeat such a joke ever again.

If you have suggestions, comments, please reach out to us – post a comment or email us. We are listening.

Rashmi Sinha
CEO, SlideShare Inc

Yahoo profiles just became more interesting. Starting today, you can get updates from popular web services on your Yahoo profile. For example, a review from Yelp might show up, a tweet from Twitter, and we are excited to say - a slideshow from SlideShare!

This is one more place that your presentation will now show up. One more chance for you to expose it to more people, and get more views. If you use Yahoo, please go to your profile. Click on Updates and then Share More. Click on SlideShare (at bottom of list), enter your username. Thats all.

Now when you upload or favorite a presentation on SlideShare, it will show up in your profile updates.