Socialmedian acquired by business network Xing

European business networking site Xing has acquired socialmedian, a service created by former Jobster chief executive Jason Goldberg to share and discuss news stories. Goldberg’s blog post announcing the deal doesn’t name a price, although a couple of sites say it was for $4 million in cash, with a possible earn out between $700,000 and $3.5 million

Hamburg, Germany-based Xing plans to integrate socialmedian into its product sometime next year, stating that socialmedian’s approach is ideal to help busy professionals find relevant news. Goldberg has also been named vice president of the Xing applications platform.

As the name implies, New York and Pune, India-based socialmedian takes a more social approach to news-sharing; instead of highlighting the most popular stories like Digg, it helps you see the news that people in your social network find interesting. The site has added a lot of cool new features over the past year, including the ability to follow “newsmakers” and share posts on micro-blogging site Twitter, although I still found it less useful than sharing news within existing social networks. It definitely makes sense to incorporate socialmedian into a larger product.

Socialmedian left beta testing earlier this month, and at the time I wondered if the move might be preparation for an acquisiton or other business deal. Looks like it was. Goldberg says the site’s traffic tripled in November. Xing, meanwhile, says it has 7 million users.

The startup raised close to $600,000 from the Washington Post and individual angel investors.