Here’s how it works
Keyboard shortcuts usually involve pressing and holding either the CTRL key if you’re a Windows user or CMD if you’re on a Mac. We don’t want to interfere with your browser’s own shortcuts, however, that  is why our shortcuts always start by pressing and holding the SHIFT key.

When you’re on the XING platform, press the key combination you need to type a question mark. This combination varies of course depending on where you are and what kind of keyboard you’re using. What’s important here is that the cursor must not be within an input field, otherwise the shortcut feature won’t work. So provided your cursor isn’t in an input field and you then use the question mark keyboard combination, a lightbox will appear showing you a list of the shortcuts available to you.

So if you now press SHIFT + n, you can then send a new message to a contact, no matter where you currently are on the platform. By pressing SHIFT + k, you’ll be taken directly to your contacts. The downside here is that your mouse is going to start feeling a bit lonely, but the upside is of course that you can network much faster than before.

By the way – you can also use shortcuts to switch between the top navigation bar. As you already know from the overview, the shortcut SHIFT + x will take to you to the XING homepage.

Here are a few other handy navigation bar shortcuts:
Jobs => SHIFT + j
Topics => SHIFT + t
Groups => SHIFT + g
Events => SHIFT + e
Companies => SHIFT + u

And here’s a list of all the shortcuts now available to help make it easier for you to get around the XING platform:

• Shift + k = Contacts
• Shift + s = Search *
• Shift + h = Help
• Shift + m = Invite
• Shift + l = Logg out
• Shift + n = Write message
• Shift + i = Inbox
• Shift + d = Share with contacts *
• Shift + o = Settings
• Shift + x = XING startpage
• Shift + j = Jobs
• Shift + p = Projects
• Shift + t = Themes
• Shift + g = Groups
• Shift + e = Events
• Shift + u = Companies

You won’t be needing your mouse as much anymore, so don’t forget to reduce his cheese rations!

This probably sounds like something from “Back to the future”, right? Well, at the moment it is, but it’s actually highly realistic from a technical point of view! That’s because XING is rolling out its API (Application Programming Interface) for external developers which enables them to build great apps just like the idea I mentioned above.

A number of companies such as Promerit, Cobook and twofloats already used the XING API during its beta phase and integrated XING into their own programs and websites or even built brand new apps specially designed to get the most out of XING. The “Radar for XING” iPhone app built by twofloats allows users to see if any of their XING contacts also running the app are nearby. HR consulting firm Promerit links XING to corporate job candidate management systems so that potential job candidates can easily register there using their XING login details. The benefit for businesses here is that job ads can be posted on XING from the comfort of their own SAP systems. The Cobook app, on the other hand, allows users to synchronize their contacts from various platforms, e.g. their computer, Twitter or XING, and merge them into a single address book.

As I mentioned above, the key to all of these apps is the new interface that XING offers to external developers. We’ve been working with a number of external experts over the last few months to test our API, and are now able to move it from a beta to a live version so any developer can get involved!

API: Linking XING with external developers

So what exactly is our API? Put simply, it’s an interface that allows developers to access select parts and features of the XING platform which they can then integrate into their own apps. Developers wanting to get involved and access the API can log on to the portal using their existing XING login details. In keeping with XING’s usual high standard of data protection and privacy, both developers and their apps will be verified before being accepted.

Where are the apps?

You’ll soon come across all kinds of apps that have been programmed in conjunction with the API, e.g. as an add-on for your email program, as an app in the iTunes App Store, or even as a feature for your new car’s sat nav. We’ve only just rolled out the API, but more than 3,000 developers signed up during the beta phase alone so we’re expecting things to snowball really quickly. From time to time we’ll feature new apps here in our blog, but to get things started, we’ve added a few to our gallery on the developer platform and we’ll continue adding to them as time goes on.
One thing I would like to point out is that as a XING member you always retain full control over your own data, even when using third-party applications. This is thanks to the industry-standard OAuth authentication mechanism, meaning that when you start an app for the first time, you need to provide your express consent for it to access your details. The app will tell you exactly which of your details it will access and it will only work if you grant permission for it to access these details, which can be revoked at any time. To make this a little clearer for you, your privacy settings contain a list of all third-party apps you’ve authorized to date.

I hope this blog post gives you some insight into our API without being too technical. We’re really looking forward to seeing what our developer community can come up with, and we’re sure that lots of great new apps will pop up over the next few months that will help to make our product even more useful to you!

The top 8 reasons to work at XING
Our project looked at how we can provide the best-possible networking experience in the future. My seven project teammates and I didn’t just want to use the Prototyping Days 2012 event to look into the future, we wanted to focus on what drives XING, i.e. its employees. Our aim was to show why we’re so passionate about XING and why we love working here. Our personal contribution as just a few of the 520 employees was a video we made that presents the top 8 reasons to work at XING.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our team consisted of people from the Technology, Customer Relations and Product teams. The video went through its baptism of fire at the presentation session and passed with flying colors. In fact we won the Best Spirit Award for our efforts. But let’s face it – we got our Executive Board to crawl under the table soccer table, so I’m sure we deserved to win )

Want to feel XING’s positive vibes for yourself? Just join the team!!

As was the case last year, every employee–from the customer support through to marketing and product teams–had three days’ time to put aside their usual work and get together with other people to work on developing a specific idea.

Kick-off event in the future XING offices (work in progress)

The XING Prototyping Days kick-off event involved a keynote speech by guest speaker Anne Pascual from the international design and innovation consultancy IDEO in which she presented examples of how she and her colleagues came up with long-term innovation solutions. But it wasn’t just Anne’s speech that was unique, the location was too. In keeping with the motto tabula rasa, the entire company was invited to make the very short journey from our current offices to the new ones in the Metropolishaus building just a couple of doors away for Anne’s keynote speech. The new “offices” were somewhat dusty as they’re currently a work in progress with the big move not scheduled until next spring, but they still proved to be an apt setting for innovation and creativity.
After Anne’s keynote speech, everyone returned to the XING headquarters to put their heads together and come up with great new ideas. The company offered free lunches to make sure that everyone could concentrate on the job at hand, while get-togethers in the evening also provided an opportunity to wind down and exchange ideas after a hard day of innovation.

Presentations and summer party in an idyllic setting

The highlight of the Prototyping Days event took place on the third day at the Leuchtturm in Harburg. After lunch the entire company traveled by bus to the presentation venue next to the Außenmühlenteich lake to present their projects as a team. As was the case last year, several teams stood out thanks to their technical innovations, while others presented clever ideas or came up with extraordinary presentation methods. And rest assured that the results of some of these projects are bound to appear on the XING platform at some point in the future.Sie dürfen gespannt sein!

Many business users with a XING profile also have profiles on other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. More and more personal details such as photos, comments and opinions are being posted online all the time, which is why it’s essential to ensure that you retain control over and protect your online image and reputation. We’ve teamed up with XING to offer its members online privacy and reputation protection both on the XING platform and beyond it as well.

How do XING members use secure.me?

secure.me is integrated into the XING platform, so all you need to do is activate it. To do so, just click on the secure.me button that appears in the top right-hand corner of your profile page. A window will then open asking you to authorize secure.me – and that’s it! You’re protected by secure.me!

Facebook protection

If you’d also like to protect your Facebook profile, you’ll need to link it with secure.me (you only need to do this once). After you’ve done that, secure.me will provide 24/7 protection for your Facebook profile and friend network. On top of that you’ll receive a clear overview of hits involving your details, and can even opt for a weekly security report email.

secure.me uses semantic language recognition technology to look for critical comments in users’ Facebook timelines and their friend networks. secure.me can also find photos of users – even if they’re not tagged in it – and this form of protection also extends to photos in their friend networks. secure.me can also identify highly personal data and then show users what to do in order to protect it. secure.me also analyzes third-party apps that have access to the user’s Facebook profile and then shows them what information the apps add to their profile and their friends’ walls.

Safely navigate the World Wide Web

Thanks to secure.me, XING members can also keep an eye on their name, their company’s name, and their children while they’re surfing the net. To do so, just create a customized search alert in your secure.me account. Once you’ve done that, secure.me will provide 24/7 protection by monitoring the net for your search terms. To see, a full chronological overview of the latest posts, comments, photos and videos, just log in to your secure.me account where you can also filter and even export the results listed there.

Special offer for Premium members

XING members can activate secure.me for free. XING basic members can use secure.me Basic for free rather than the regular price of €1.99 a month, and this service includes online monitoring for one search term and one Facebook profile. XING Premium members can take advantage of the advanced secure.me Premium package for free rather than the regular price of €4.99 a month. This provides online monitoring for up to three search terms and three Facebook profiles, and reports can cover a retrospective period of three months rather than just one week.

Next-generation antivirus protection

Most PC users have been using antivirus software for many years in order to protect their systems and data. In spite of this, there is a clear lack of protection for data uploaded and made public on social networks. We therefore created secure.me as a solution to meet this need by providing users with comprehensive online privacy and reputation protection. We’re now happy to roll our product out to all of XING’s users to help them protect their online reputation from now on.

Back in December 2011, XING launched its Beta Labs as a platform for users wanting to try out new XING features early on in their development. This also gave them an opportunity to provide feedback and shape new features to meet their own needs.

Today we launched our conversation view, which started out life as a Beta Labs feature and proved to be an instant hit so we had to make it available to more Beta Labs users than originally planned. We then took all of those users’ feedback and added what we could before today’s feature launch.

But what is the conversation view? The conversation view summarizes your personal messages so that you can see your entire written correspondence with one or more people on a certain subject. Individual messages are listed below one another in a compact view that just shows the first few lines of each message. To view a certain message in full, all you need to do is click anywhere in the compact message view which will then expand to display the entire message. You may well have come across this before if you have a smartphone or email program that already has this feature which is also great for collaboration processes as everyone involved can follow the discussion.

How it works

The sidebar on the left contains an envelope icon that only shows unread messages. To go to your inbox, just click on the All messages link where you’ll then be presented with an overview of all your messages. When you write a new message, you automatically start a new conversation. Replies to this message therefore continue this conversation, irrespective of whether the reply comes from you or one of your recipients. The right-hand side of this window shows you who’s involved in the conversation, and you can filter your inbox so you see just unread or sent messages.

If you want to send a message to someone involved in a conversation, just click on the little envelope icon in the messages box. And don’t forget that you can still search for certain senders or recipients in your inbox and delete conversations to keep things nice and tidy there.

If you comment on one of your contacts’ status updates or posts, you’ll now be informed if someone responds so you can always keep track of what’s going on there and see how the discussion develops.

As is the case with the other notification icons in the sidebar, a little green bubble with a number will appear next to the comments and likes icon if someone comments on or likes your activity. You can then click on the icon itself to get a quick overview of the latest comments and likes. If you click on the headline of a specific notification, the notification will be marked as read. If you simply close the overview window, all of the comment and like notifications there will be marked as read.

As always, you can also be notified by email if anyone responds to your updates and posts. We hope this helps to make it easier for you to get the latest on XING while out and about. And please don’t forget to send us your feedback so we can keep improving things!

Anyone looking to discuss specialist topics with other XING members can now take advantage of our latest feature – XING Topics – which is a great way of finding and interacting with the latest interesting posts on a wide range of topics. You don’t need to sign up to use this feature, just activate it in Beta Labs and you’re good to go!

Topics are displayed as tags and you can choose to follow them so you always get the latest posts there. Your Topics homepage also provides you with an overview of the topics you’re following together with the latest posts there.

It’s really easy to get involved in discussions – just like a post you’re interested in or add a comment there. Please note that everything you post, like or comment on in XING Topics is public and can be found in search engines once Topics passes the beta stage.

Beta stage with more to come

This product is still in its infancy and we’re working hard to add new features to it over the next few weeks. The next steps will focus among other things on relevance, i.e. which posts are must-haves, and reputation, i.e. which posts are proving popular and putting me in the spotlight.

We’re sure that XING Topics will help to form the basis for lively exchanges on a wide range of different topics and issues while also providing an opportunity to foster relations with like-minded people. Not only that, it’s also a great source of knowledge!

Your target group, your reputation, your benefit

If you’re a blogger, XING Topics represents a great new way for you to share your posts and gain new insights. When coupled with the existing status post and poll features, you now have several ways of reaching out to your personal network while groups can help you to add new contacts with other members there.

With XING Topics, your target group is basically anyone with an interest in the same topic as you, which of course acts as a basis for discussion without being members of the same group!

One key benefit of XING Topics is its flexibility as it’s really easy to post and comment on topics you’re interested in. And don’t forget that active involvement in topics raises your profile among the XING community as your activity also appears in your profile. Other members can then like your posts which, just like the recently introduced endorsement feature, helps to improve your standing among the community.

A XING profile and the many groups available here on XING are a great way to showcase yourself as an expert online as you can list your skills and experience and also get involved in specialist discussions. You can also link to any other online profiles you may have, be they on Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia – even your own website or blog.

Today we released a new XING Beta Labs feature called RSS import to make it easier for you to share your blog, ideas, expertise and views with your network. All you need to do is go to your profile – where you’ll see a notification text about the new feature – and add the RSS feed to your existing profiles. Then you’re all set!

Content from your blog or CMS will be automatically shared with your network as an update where your contacts can also post comments and share it with their network. Happy blogging with the new RSS import feature!

P.S.: If you don’t know your RSS feed’s address, just look for a small orange icon on your website and copy the address there. A number of browsers also offer a subscribe feature that will show you your RSS feed address.

P.P.S.: If you’re a Google Reader user you can also share your favorite articles or ones with a certain tag as RSS feeds, which is a great way of sharing links to content you really like!

The first questions that usually spring to mind are “Do I even need a XING Company Profile?” and “Why?” In order to answer these questions you should think about your business and target group, the latter being where XING stands out from the social network crowd and their business profile offering because we provide a clearly defined target group that’s highly appealing to companies. To put it another way, you may not reach everyone out there, but you will reach those that matter to you such as key decision-makers and educated, affluent users. According to AGOF, the German Working Group for Online Media Research, 40% of XING users are business professionals, i.e. academics or with a net monthly household income of at least €3,500. XING is also the right place if you want to use your Company Profile to position yourself as an employer and reach out to potential candidates thanks to the more than 12 million registered experts and executives who may be open to new career opportunities. Many of our business customers appreciate the professional environment that XING provides along with top customer support and compliance with strict German data protection legislation.

So what can you do with a XING Company Profile as a freelancer, SME or multinational? Here’s a (by no means exhaustive) list of the top five use cases for XING Company Profiles:

• Employer branding: A XING Company Profile enables you to position yourself as a great employer among more than 5 million employees, experts and executives in German-speaking countries. You can add graphics, logos, company updates, and contacts to personalize your profile where visitors can check out employee statistics to see what skills and expertise they have to offer and who they might end up working with.
• Recruiting: You can also recruit people via your profile by posting job ads there as well as by adding links to your career pages and including HR staff as contacts. A XING Company Profile allows you to reach out to potential candidates without them having to visit your website with the added benefit of being able to check out their XING profile so you can see if they’re suited to the vacancy.
• PR: You can use your Company Profile as a PR channel by posting press releases or tweets (it’s really easy to link your Twitter profile). It’s also worth bearing in mind that a lot of journalists and multipliers are active on XING and a number of service providers, cooperation partners and customers are bound to be interested in your company updates.
• Sales and advertising channel: You can use your Company Profile to let your (potential) customers know about new products, services, special offers, discounts, etc. as this is a highly effective B2B channel due to the business target group active on our platform.
• Alternative company presence: A XING Company Profile provides freelancers and SMEs with a great alternative to a website or Yellow Pages entry that’s easy to put together and maintain.

Are you looking to use a Company Profile for a number of different reasons? No problem! Company Profiles can tailor to various needs in order to offer genuine added value to a number of different target groups. A great title also makes it easier for people interested in your business to filter relevant content. If you’re interested in more handy tips and tricks, check out our blog post here.