Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and ebay are not the only companies with an API, here is a list of 10 other, smaller, but just as great and useful services, enjoy!
Sign In Systems
Have you ever had to choose between facebook connect, twitter sign in or OpenID ? While it’s possible to develop a system that handles all these logins, wouldn’t it be great if there was one way to use all? The following two services will let you make a sign up/sign in system with support for accounts such as Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, OpenId and/or Twitter.
RPX
Used By: blippr.com
RPX is not completely free, but its basic account is good enough to let people sign in to your site without making an account, the paid versions have great features though, such as user status updating between other things.
Click Pass
Used By: Disqus.com , HackerNews.com , Plaxo.com
Click Pass is not as easy to install as RPX but it can accomplish the same thing, which is to provide easy access for users to your site.
Book Search
ISBN Database
This one is one of my favorites, on top book information retrieval and search you can also get a book’s price from major sites like AbeBooks, eCampus, and Amazon. I wrote a tutorial for this api in a previous post.
Weather
You want to build an app that tells you how hot or cold it is without having to open the window? Are you really that lazy? 😉 In that case what can I do but tell you how to do it.
WeatherBug
From their site, “you can develop any application around:”
- Live weather conditions
- Severe weather alerts in the U.S.
- Daily forecasts
- U.S. weather camera images
- International weather data
Anti Spam
reCAPTCHA
Who uses it? Craigslist, Twitter, Facebook
Used by most and hated by many, recaptcha is my favorite captcha script both because it’s easy to use and because by using it your users will be helping digitize books. It also has a “mailhide” api with which you can “hide” emails behind a captcha form.
Jobs Search
Don’t start up with an empty job listing website or if your site is already big add more jobs posts to it.
Indeed
Indeed now gets the most pageviews for job searches in the U.S. its Api also offers a free job listing script that you can use and charge people for posting.
CareerBuilder
Second to job searches comes CareerBuilder, the thing I like most about this api is that it returns each job’s latitude and longitude which is very useful these days when everything seems to be going more location specific.
Twitter Related
Want to know what people are tweeting about a particular website. You could make a widget for your company’s website about what people think of your company in “real-time”.
TwitterCounter
Get a particular user’s stats. This would be good for celebrity/political websites, where you could show a person’s twitter stats if you are writing about them for example.
Classifieds
I won’t lie, I tried all the API’s I mentioned except for this one, but it looks good, what do you think?
Oodle
If you want to have your own classifieds site, ala Craiglist, there are two things you can do
- use SimplePie to parse Craigslist’s rss feeds ( which we don’t encourage )
- or use Oodle to supplement your existing listings 🙂
These were some of my favorite API’s, what are yours? Let me know about them in the comments.