XING aims to be a platform for business professionals, offering a platform through which supply meets demand. They seem to be quite good at it. Take a moment to review the services they’re offering and judge for yourself. I think of them mainly as an European competitor to LinkedIn® and they have an API too, which is in beta testing right now. Just request a beta account and you may get an invitation.
I’ve developed LiPS, a WordPress™ plugin which downloads your LinkedIn® profile data and I’m adding XING as an alternative professional network. The detail of the API documentation is not at the level of LinkedIn yet, but they have a working API and I got my profile data out of it using the oauth-php module.
This API, like the LinkedIn® API, has different resources, each of which can be accessed through an URI. Some of these appear to accept a filter, but both the URI and the filters are not fully documented yet. You’ll learn there’s an filter option when you review the Quick Start Guide. I was unable to find a description of the User Profile resource, so I decided to post my results in this blog.
The API call https://api.xing.com/v1/users/me will return a structure like the one below, represented in JSON format. This resource is protected and you’ll need an OAuth Access Token.
{ "users":[ { "instant_messaging_accounts":[ ], "haves":"<Offering>", "professional_experience":{ "awards":[ ], "primary_company":{ "url":"<company url>", "company_size":"1", "title":"Software Engineer", "end_date":null, "name":"ten Berge ICT", "career_level":"PROFESSIONAL_EXPERIENCED", "industry":"INFORMATION_TECHNOLOGY_AND_SERVICES", "description":"", "tag":"TENBERGEICT", "begin_date":"2012-01" }, "non_primary_companies":[ { "url":null, "company_size":null, "title":"System Engineer", "end_date":null, "name":"<Company Name>", "career_level":"PROFESSIONAL_EXPERIENCED", "industry":"CIVIL_SERVICE", "description":"<Job description>", "tag":"<Company Tag>", "begin_date":"2010-08" } ] }, "badges":[ ], "last_name":"ten Berge", "wants":<keywords>, "educational_background":{ "qualifications":[ "Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)", "Prince II Foundation", "nCipher Certified System Engineer", "Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management" ], "schools":[ { "subject":"Hogere Informatica", "end_date":"2009-05", "name":"Christelijke Hogeschool Windesheim", "degree":"B\/ICT", "notes":null, "begin_date":"2005-08" } ] }, "time_zone":{ "name":"Europe\/Amsterdam", "utc_offset":2 }, "active_email":"<email address>", "organisation_member":null, "first_name":"Bas", "photo_urls":{ "large":"https:\/\/m1.xing.com\/img\/n\/nobody_m.140x185.jpg", "medium_thumb":"https:\/\/m1.xing.com\/img\/n\/nobody_m.57x75.jpg", "thumb":"https:\/\/m1.xing.com\/img\/n\/nobody_m.30x40.jpg", "mini_thumb":"https:\/\/m1.xing.com\/img\/n\/nobody_m.18x24.jpg", "maxi_thumb":"https:\/\/m1.xing.com\/img\/n\/nobody_m.70x93.jpg" }, "gender":"m", "id":"<user id>", "page_name":"Bas_tenBerge", "languages":{ "en":"GOOD", "nl":null, "de":"BASIC" }, "birth_date":{ "year":null, "month":null, "day":null }, "interests":null, "display_name":"Bas ten Berge", "premium_services":[ ], "permalink":"https:\/\/www.xing.com\/profile\/Bas_tenBerge", "business_address":{ "province":null, "country":"NL", "zip_code":null, "mobile_phone":null, "email":null, "street":null, "fax":null, "city":"Zwolle", "phone":null }, "web_profiles":{ "other":[ "http:\/\/nl.linkedin.com\/in\/bastb" ], "blog":[ "http:\/\/www.tenberge-ict.nl\/blog" ] }, "private_address":{ "province":null, "country":null, "zip_code":null, "mobile_phone":null, "email":"<email address>", "street":null, "fax":null, "city":null, "phone":null } } ] }
First things first, I think requesting account details using me instead of an userid is a developer friendly choice.
Obviously I’ve modified the value of some fields. Don’t depend on the structure documented here as I can expect this structure is subject to change.
As usual, feedback is very likely to be appreciated.
Update I got feedback in the XING developers forum on xing.com. The API documentation is fairly complete, it has an overview page which shows the methods and a detailed page per method. That detailed page has an OAuth test console, showing the full structure of the data returned in XML or JSON format.
Wow! Finally I got a weblog from where I be capable of truly
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This section outlines the fields in the normalized profile structure. The Availability column shows whether or not all providers include the field in their profile data responses.