The Successes of my first AJAX Application: Part 5

I am just over half way through talking about some of the success of my AJAX application. The fourth part is about external API's. This actually has some relation to an earlier post that I made: Retail Web Service Therapy

The Subtitle for this entry is: It got me thinking about all the other API's that I want to see.

What I mean by this really is that I want to see more feed/blog companies exposing more about the statistics. I want to see more retail companies exposing their catalogues. I want to see more News Corporations expose their news as feeds. I want to see search companies expose their results as feeds. I want to see search companies offer more interesting API's (Yahoo is about the most interesting in my opinion).

I just want to see more, I want a central list of companies that offer their services. After all, I am a consumer to them, maybe not always directly of products, but of their data.

It also got me thinking, that I don't really know of all the API's REST or SOAP that are out there. I would love to start taking advantage of them.

I would like to add a bit more dynamism to my apps. For instance, a particular blog entry that I do I might like to see the all the important keywords, for each keyword see its relative popularity, see other keywords that might help me get a better spread of the potential search results, see the relative ranking of keywords on advert revenue (so I can work out revenue potential if needs be). From this, I would like to query other sources so that I can cross reference and provide more feedback to my viewers, this information might contain the importance of a related blog, it might contain how many people link to it, who else that blog links to. It could provide a further level of service, for each keyword that might be a product I could query the retailer and provide best buy information or maybe localised product information based on where the user resides or even information about second hand items that are only 10 miles away.

Just little things like that. I am pretty sure all of what I have talked about is not revolutionary.

What I need (and I really need help from the readers) is lists of companies that offer Web API's to their software. Companies who offer RSS feeds that provide useful information.