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Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use

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I prefer the data from Geonames.org, which has a simple REST service for geocoding names, finding locations close to each other, and some other great geographical backend calculations. The Geonames database is one of the best available, based on multiple data sets, and it uses a liberal Creative Commons Attribution license for its data output. It's also quick and responsive.

Story tools

3. OpenID

No, Web APIs aren't just about maps and map data – they can be about people, too. OpenID is a new service created by blogging company Six Apart and adopted by many other sites. The API lets you offload the tasks of registering and managing user accounts from your application to an identity provider. Users like it because they can use one user account on several different Web sites. Conversely, identity providers can use the API so their users can use other Web sites without having to maintain separate accounts.

The API is interesting in that it depends on HTTP redirects to and from the identity provider Web site. This allows logon systems that depend on browser state, such as cookies or certificates. Parameters are passed back and forth through URL parameters, including digital signatures for validation. A great set of open source libraries in Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP from JanRain, makes integrating this API relatively painless.

4. Amazon S3

One clever system for off-loading tedious Web development tasks is the Simple Storage Service (S3) from Amazon's Web Services. S3 lets you store and manage files on a Web server in Amazon's data center, and you can use the API to secure certain files from the public. S3 has both a REST and a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interface, and Amazon charges a few pennies for each gigabit of data stored or transferred.

S3 is a really convenient way to scale storage of data, and there are applications from simple backup services to rich Web applications. The photo-sharing service SmugMug, for example, uses S3 as the backend storage for all its images, saving the time and effort of provisioning dozens of Web servers.