Collection of Useful APIs for web designers and developers

Posted on 03. Aug, 2011 by bmackler in Resources

An application programming interface, more commonly known as an API is a code structure and outline that allows software to communicate with each other to enhance the user experience. This allows developers to build, extend and expand so many online tools. You can set up interactive maps, video streaming, social media and everything in between.

Web developers can take advantage of countless APIs available to them online to enhance the content and functionality to their sites. Today lets take a look at a collection of some of the best and most useful APIs available online today.

Leave a comment and let us know what APIs you like using the best.

Google Latitude API

The Google Latitude API allows for websites and programs to integrate with Google Latitude, enabling users to update and read their current location, their location history

Useful APIs

JanRain

Janrain helps connect your site to the social web through a robust set of APIs and social widget interfaces. It allows your visitors to sign-in to your site with their existing accounts on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, LinkedIn or other networks and then publish their comments

Useful APIs

Google Map API

Google Maps has a wide array of APIs that let you embed the robust functionality and everyday usefulness of Google Maps into your own website and applications, and overlay your own data on top of them:

Useful APIs

Google Direction API

The Google Directions API is a service that calculates directions between locations using an HTTP request. Directions may specify origins, destinations and waypoints either as text strings

Useful APIs

Yahoo Placefinder

Yahoo! PlaceFinder is a geocoding Web service that helps developers make their applications location-aware by converting street addresses or place names into geographic coordinates

Useful APIs

Google Font API

Google WebFont API uses CSS3’s @font-face to add web fonts to your site. Currently limited only 18 different font-families. Google WebFont API provides by far the easiest implementation for custom typography. All you need to do is simply hotlink to their stylesheet link and then call the font in a CSS style.

Useful APIs

Yahoo Fire Eagle

Yahoo! PlaceFinder is a geocoding Web service that helps developers make their applications location-aware by converting street addresses or place names into geographic coordinates

Useful APIs

Google Ajax Language

With the AJAX Language API, you can translate and detect the language of blocks of text within a webpage using only Javascript. In addition, you can enable transliteration on any textfield or textarea in your web page.

Useful APIs

Dropbox API

Use the Dropbox API to enhance your mobile applications with online file browsing, synchronization, backup, and sharing features.

Useful APIs

Zencoder

Zencoder’s Video Encoding API allows you to seamlessly integrate your application with Zencoder’s extremely fast and scalable encoding platform.

Useful APIs

YouTube API

The Player APIs allow you to have an embedded player, or a chromeless player that you can then customize within HTML or Flash.

The Data API lets your app perform a lot of the operations available on YouTube, including uploading videos and modifying user playlists.

Useful APIs

Awe.sm

Awe.sm APIs for integrating their social media campaign tracking tools into your website.

Useful APIs

Embed.ly

Embedly provides a powerful API to convert standard URLs into embedded videos, images, and rich article previews

Useful APIs

Adaptive Payments API

The Adaptive Payments API is a suite of payment services that allow merchants and developers to select the payment scenario most suitable to their needs. Merchants and developers can create applications that manage payments, payment preapprovals, and refunds. Merchants and developers can also send money peer-to-peer, split payments in both parallel and chained models, accept guest payments, and schedule disbursements. It works on multiple platforms including the web and mobile environments.

Useful APIs

Yahoo Meme API

Meme is a light-blogging platform focused on quick multimedia posts that can be easily spread with one-click reposts. Users can easily read, post, and repost content through Meme.

Useful APIs

Open Social

Friends are fun, but they’re only on some websites. OpenSocial helps these sites share their social data with the web. Applications that use the OpenSocial APIs can be embedded within a social network itself, or access a site’s social data from anywhere on the web.