CODEWITHSUNDEEP
web-servicesweb-applications
Matt Smith
Matt Smith

Reputation: 1231

Little known or useful Web Services we all should know about

Web services and web APIs have managed to increase the accessibility of the information stored and catalogued on the internet. They have also opened up a vast array of enterprise power functionality for smaller thin client applications.

By taping into these services developers can provide functionality that would have taken them months perhaps years to set up. They can combine them into single applications that make life generally easier for its users.

Whether displaying information about the music being played, finding items of interest in the locale of the user or just simply tweeting and blogging from the same application - the possibilities are growing everyday.

I want to know about the most interesting or useful services that are out there, especially ones that most of us may not have heard about yet. Do you maintain an API or service? or do you have a clever mash up that provides even more benefits than the originals?

Upvotes: 16

Views: 2344

Answers (9)

grenade
grenade

Reputation: 32169

The World Bank API is pretty cool. Google uses it in search results. My favourite implementations are the cartograms at worldmapper. Tourist Destinations
(source: worldmapper.org)

Upvotes: 5

Jon
Jon

Reputation: 1

The United States Postal Service offers a web service that does address standardization. Quite useful in reducing clutter and cleaning data before it gets put into your database.

Upvotes: 0

Sug
Sug

Reputation: 802

MuiscBrainz
Excellent service for music mashups.
Not so many knows that Last.FM initial database was scraped from this service.

Upvotes: 0

Addsy
Addsy

Reputation: 4054

Another interesting one for liberal brits! ;)

The Guardian news paper have their own api

http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform

Upvotes: 0

Addsy
Addsy

Reputation: 4054

Ah yes - here's another one I've been meaning to check out but haven't tried yet

The BBC offer a bunch of apis/feeds that look very promising

http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/data

They include apis for accessing schedule data for both TV and Radio listings along with all kinds of news searches. It even looks like they'll be offering some sort of geo-location service soon so it will be interesting to see what that has to offer

Upvotes: 0

jckdnk111
jckdnk111

Reputation: 2368

I like the RESTful API for weather.com. It's free and very useful for the new age of location-aware apps: https://registration.weather.com/ursa/xmloap/step1

It does require registration, but they don't spam you or anything - it's just to provide you a key to use the API.

Upvotes: 0

Addsy
Addsy

Reputation: 4054

I was just about to have a stab at using the SoundCloud API

I know many people who already use for sharing their musical masterpieces and its a pretty good site. Hopefully the api will be as well!

Upvotes: 2

Oded
Oded

Reputation: 499112

YQL - Yahoo provide a tool that lets you query many different API's across the web, even for sites that don't provide an API as such.

From the site:

The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across Web services.

...

With YQL, developers can access and shape data across the Internet through one simple language, eliminating the need to learn how to call different APIs.

Upvotes: 7

Arkaaito
Arkaaito

Reputation: 7387

It's very niche, but I happen to think the OpenCongress API is amazing.

Less niche: Google Translate has an API which will guess the language of something. You'd be AMAZED how frequently this comes in handy (even though it's not as tweakable as you'd like and is not trained on small samples).

Upvotes: 3

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